The ULTRAFRENCH Language

If you don’t know what ULTRAFRENCH is, watch this video first.

If you came here looking for the ULTRAFRENCH grammar, an up-to-date version is available at https://www.nguh.org/static/UF-GRAMMAR.pdf. It is updated practically every time a commit is pushed to this repository.

This repository houses the grammar and dictionary definition file for the ULTRAFRENCH language, as well as the ULTRAFRENCHER, a program that generates a LaTeX file from the dictionary definitions, and which can convert between IPA and the ULTRAFRENCH orthography.

Specifically,

• The entire grammar is contained in GRAMMAR.tex.
• The dictionary is contained in DICTIONARY.txt.
• A list of sound changes to convert French to UF is contained in LEXURGY.lsc.
• The ULTRAFRENCHER is contained in main.cc.

Building the grammar

This project has several dependencies:

• CMake 3.28 or later;
• An up-to-date C++ compiler (Clang 19 is used by the project authors);
• XeLaTeX (texlive is recommended).

To compile the grammar to a PDF document, first build the ULTRAFRENCHER by running the following commands in the ULTRAFRENCHER directory.

$ cd ULTRAFRENCHER
$ cmake -S . -B out
$ cmake --build out

For Unix systems, various scripts to generate the dictionary and build the grammar can be found in the SCRIPTS directory. To build both the grammar and dictionary, run

./SCRIPTS/BUILD.sh

No-one working on this project uses Windows, so if you do, figure it out yourself. Note that XeLaTeX is required the build the grammar. PDFLaTeX or LuaLaTeX will not work!