Bugs Fixed, and other observations
March 14, 2008: All windows showing Turkish, not least the translator window itself, should spontaneously bring up a Turkish character set. You can do this manually - in Internet Explorer, it's "View>Encoding>Turkish (ISO)" or "Turkish (Windows)" - but not even a Liberian website will make you do that, and I say that with 1000% confidence. You check Liberian websites and tell me if I'm wrong!

Also: by now I think I've fixed most or all of the problems I myself - and perhaps you too - found in sentences with izafet. Runtime errors, actually. Python 2.5, which is what I developed in, has the ability to handle sets, but Python 2.3, which is what my host uses, does not, so I had to write some functions to duplicate this modern scientific convenience.
July 27, 2008: Thought the Turkish data-miner might do Azerbaijani as well, but now I promise nothing. Doesn't seem to have trouble with Azerbaijani words that use the apostrophe as a letter. (In Turkish, the apostrophe is strictly a grammatical cipher, and a very helpful one for this particular utility.) But such Azerbaijani as I see on such websites as there are indicates the apostrophe is only a letter in this language, and is not used as it is in Turkish to demark the border between a proper noun and its inflections. That's a nasty break.

Or maybe not, since how much printed Azerbaijani (Latin or Cyrillic) is there, anyway? To say nothing of Turkmen, whose own grammar is fraught. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but subject and object participles in this language are about the same, so "man-eating shark" and "shark the man ate" could be the same. If you're bathing on the Caspian and people on the beach start waving their arms and yelling at you, I urge you to swim to shore, pronto, just to be on the safe side: I doubt they're saying, "Hey, we've barbecued the shark and eaten almost all of it, don't you want some before it's all gone? Also, the beer isn't getting any colder!") I have a Kazakh primer which shows a hyphen where Turkish would show an apostrophe, and that would be a great boon, but I still don't know if this is just a helpful invention of the author, or whether Kazakhs themselves do this all the time. I really want to put the Altaica in Machine Altaica, but the fact is, only in Turkish is there a great vein of written ore.
August 11, 2008: Got Firefox 3 working OK with the site. Exactly why this is thought to be a superior browser, I cannot say: most of the nice features (and Firebug is a nice feature) are evident only to developers, not to users. The one and only "computer science" course I ever took was in 1978, and there were few dogmatists back then. Anyway, she runs. If your Firefox popup blocker is a-blockin', the procedure for disabling it is rather elaborate: "Tools>Options>Content", then uncheck "Block pop-up windows." Don't bother with the first thing Firefox shows you, which is a we-put-your-condom-on-for-you banner across the top of the banned page, with an "Options" button showing "Impose U.N. sanctions" (just kidding!) and the like.
August 20, 2008: My chagrin was great upon discovering not only that the Portuguese for "grandfathers" is avós, not avôs as I have it right at the top of this page, but also that the Turkish translator has the word for "tourist" wrong: it's turist, not türist. I have changed the latter, and scolded myself for depending upon memory. As for the granddads, I'm keepin' 'em as is. One of my dictionaries allows as how my spelling is pouco usada, and for the purposes of a typing exercise, my technicality-loving conscience is clear: pouco ain't nunca. I'd seen the commoner spelling on Portuguese websites, but thought little of it: those guys often use acute accents where Brazilians use the circumflex. Here, however, hands join across the Atlantic.
October 29, 2008: Just about to roll out the aprosody analyzer, when I get an execution error I can't figure. It's in the function that converts cardinal numbers to ordinals. You give it a number, or a numeral, and it gives back, or ought to give back, a word with "st" or "nd" or "rd" or "th" on the end of it. Except sometimes it throws up its hands, as if I gave it a pizza or a gerbil or a Belgian Defense Minister. In the more formal precincts of computer science, these are known as type errors. In such circumstances, confusion is understandable. But wherefore the confusion? I'm unsure. The admittedly occult example string will be processed OK, but changes to it may not be met with cow-eyed tolerance.
February 16, 2009: The Turkish miner was balking, and I thought it was just a Slow Server Day, but that is a slander against my very-good-except-for-sticking-with-Python-2.3 host. In fact, my own program was crashing. Turns out it objected to line breaks in the input. I believe I've got the machinery culling them now. Ought to have been easy, something like replace(/\n/g,""), but I never could make that work and came up with, as one so often must, a string-handling function of my own. Believers in what are known in Lower Computerovia as "regular expressions" are full of illogical assurances. It's easy! Just do ten hard things first! Give me a Turkish crossword any day.
February 19, 2009: The manifold-inhibition "model" differs from its companions in that it runs a Java applet. This was compiled in 1.6.0_03, which may not be backward-compatible with the Java Runtime Environment you have, but we shall soon find out. If it isn't, you can always upgrade your computer quickly and for free by downloading the latest JRE from sun.com. I have called computer languages "the several living dialects of Esperanto," but Java is Esperanto: a language hardly anyone actually speaks, full of rules more inexcusably cavalier for having been willfully invented in living memory, in a gymnasium for those pedants who, unlike most pedants, Like It To Hurt. Very different from JavaScript, which is a friendly dog rather than a sullen reptile, and for which there is always plenty of cheerful assistance available on the Internet. The other "models" are all-JavaScript, and the code is available for viewing as stated in this one; the manifold-inhibition one has the Java code embedded as a very large comment in the .htm, and is likewise available for inspection.

Since I'm on the subject, and since this is an "Observations" page, I might observe here that my assertion about "Tagacata Squint" is, on Internet evidence, way off: nobody remembers it. A Google search turns up just two hits - and this site is one of them.
June 1, 2009: Finally tried the site on Safari, and most stuff looked OK, but the automatic copy-to-clipboard feature in the sample sentences and the glossary seemed not to work. I must confess that I just don't "get" Macs. Maybe from the engineering end they are elegant, but from the user end I just see zigging instead of zagging. If I wanted a computer to match my toaster, or my sofa, I'd buy a Mac. But I don't, and I haven't.
September 18, 2009: Another applet here, and yes, as intimated back in February, you better have, but fortunately can also easily get, the right JRE. I must say, one does come around to Java Swing, and if anyone wonders why computer languages have quirks, well, here's the answer: languages have quirks. Still, I was a bit annoyed at never being able to figure out how to put a spinner - or as Java Swing calls it, a JSpinner - on that third tab, where you see all those radio buttons. A spinner, a compact rolling display of numbers, would have made much more sense. But I just couldn't make it go. I might have taken my plight to the Java Forums, but I do not care to be snarled at by pimply wankers.

It will be observed I added a paginita to describe regular expressions. Sorry, but it had to be done. It was either that, or make up my own opaque convention for describing a multiplicity of alternate spellings. Better to do it the way Java expects to see it. If you make a mistake inputting a regular expression, one which the matches() function can't handle, this will be gulped by the machine - you should not crash. But your malfeasance will appear as a comment in the Java Console.

Late note: programming something utterly unrelated to this earlier today, I came across a bug report to the effect Swing text containers might have a capacity of about 38,000 characters. Haven't tested that in this applet, but I wouldn't be surprised if the roof is less than sky-high. If this were an application, not an applet, I'd program in a filechooser and you'd go to some text file that held your corpus, rather than do a copy'n'paste. if there's demand, I will so code.
September 20, 2009: Struggling to get this latest applet running on the Internet and not just on my laptop, I found success by compiling it in 1.5.0_06 but running it in 1.6.0_15. Recompiling this one likewise, I found that guy's JavaScript-to-Java compromised, so I left it as it was, compiled in 1.6.0_03. I have no idea what's going on. Hitting the Java Forums a lot of late, I really get the idea nobody understands whether this language is going in any direction orthogonal to a toilet. Maybe if you're programming microwave ovens with it, it behaves rationally and matures reasonably, but otherwise...
October 18, 2009: The applets have both been recompiled in 1.5.0_10, and I, unlike Sun Microsystems, devoutly hope they work. Meanwhile, I have also uploaded the weedwhacker, which is all-JavaScript, ahh, but tested only in IE8 and FF3.5. That may be significant, as I do not know how other browsers handle the style attribute "position." I set it throughout to "absolute," which I now know is anything but. You build a <div> with absolute positioning, then append another <div> to it likewise, the latter's "absolute" coordinates turn out to be (in IE8) "relative" to the former. OK...but I still smell a rat. I have striven to keep my HTML/JavaScript unchallenging, lowest-common-denominator you might say, so any browser can handle it, but I understand that where browser detection really matters is with styling.
October 23, 2009: Well, it finally happened: somebody USED the Turkish-to-English translator. As a translator, unfortunately; the homepage ought to have made it clear the man just ain't big enough. The sentence submitted was kilisin içinde mozaik var, "Inside the church there is a mosaic." That's me translating, not the machine. Well, this did motivate me to add içinde as well as its opposite, dışında, to the postposition lexicon. What it should have done was motivate me to create an entirely separate one, for all those wordlets Turkish uses to establish position. "Inside the box under the table in front of the window" comes out in Turkish as "On/in the window's front's table's underside's box's interior," and this device ought to be able to figure that out. (Actually it already has that ability: I could just put these wordlets in the noun lexicon. It's getting the program to convert the decrypt into English-what-English-speakers-speak that's the enduring challenge.)
December 13, 2009: Just disabled the "Get its inverse" button on this, having belatedly apprehended a fact about matrix inverses: not every matrix HAS an inverse. And during Final Exam Week! I regret any flunked physics courses this may have caused. Well, I was crunching through Deutsch's Algorithm and, because I was trying to be conscientious, decided to do Exercise 6.1.2 in Yanofsky and Mannucci's text, and got a VERY misleading answer. So. I will replace this button with something else: maybe an automatic Hadamard-matrix generator. That could be useful.
January 28, 2010: Came across a reference to a Star Trek episode in which an alien culture speaks solely in allusions to a mythology...much as described here. Only on that show, the aliens were not suspected of being demented: they were suspected of being aliens, "Darmok" specifically. Although everything on this website is copyrighted, nothing is patented, and I made no effort with this program to check whether it had been done before. By "no effort" I mean not merely "failed to check the prior art" but also "failed to watch Star Trek." But I'm flattered that such a TV show would have anticipated me.
February 17, 2010: The Turkish sample sentences and the glossary now have their direct-to-clipboard copying feature enabled only for Internet Explorer; or, more precisely stated, for any browser that recognizes the variable "window.clipboardData". I understand there is a way to arrange similar functionality in Firefox at least, but that's all on the client (you!) side. I had thought this feature worked in Firefox, but no, it surely does not. I really don't understand why IE is so hotly derided. Supposedly it has security shortcomings, and maybe incontinent spillItToClipboard capability is considered one of them. Hell, I don't care. I also don't wear a football helmet when I kiss a girl.