On Saturday 23 July 2005 10:13, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Friday 22 July 2005 13:25, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
Why is there column "gender" in table "word"? If a word can exist in multiple genders, shouldn't that rather be represented in "inflection" table? If a word has a gender on its own, wouldn't that rather be represented in WordType table? If not, there are other properties of words (for example, number) which can also be represented in "word" table, why is gender singled out?
When a word is inflected to a particular form, that word is a word in its own right and consequently will be found in the UW. The inflection is there because it does provide information and this information is
Now I'm not so sure that I understand which table is for what. Could you give an example? For example, the word "white" is a base word and the word "whiter" is its inflection. How would these two words fit into the database?
Both words will exist as a Spelling, as a Word and they may share a Meaning. When the inflections are added, in the Inflection-Word, all the missing words will be created and they will all be related to each other through this table. Contrary to a paper dictionary we want them all.
Then I have misunderstood the database design :( I believed at first that inflections would be stored in "inflection" table. Now when I understand the design better, I don't think that it is a good idea to have separate "word" for each inflection because it brings a lot of unneccesary redudance, and much room for error. For example, it would be possible to mark "whiter" as an adverb and "white" as a verb! And then, imagine the horror which would ensue if someone would use wrong PartOfSpeech for base word and now it has to be changed for 100 inflections...
Though this would be a crucial change, please think about it. I think that "word" table should contain only lemmas.
relevant for the inflections and the headword.. A Wordtype indicates a noun a verb an adjective etc.
I still don't understand why is gender singled out of all properties a word could have. For example, a verb could be transitive or intransitive, and this information is important. To give an example:
[...]
At this moment in time I would not have intransitive verbs or transitive verbs at all. To me they are verbs. When they are transitive, they have a different meaning from when they are intransitive so to me the destinction is in the meaning.
OK, for a better example, why not number? Perhaps transitivity doesn't, but number also affects inflection, much as gender does.
OK, but what if you have a longer phrase as a table field? For example, an "inflection" in table "inflection" might be "male genitive superlative" or "3rd person plural female past". I don't think it makes sense to add such phrases to the dictionary as proper entries, only so that the dictionary would have translations of them.
Are some table fields inherently translatable? Is this what you had in mind above?
Most if not all text fields will be inherently translatable, this is what I have very much in mind. The name of a font will not be translated but that is the only one at this point in time. It makes perfect sense to have this in the UW as it allows us to have a self learning User Interface. The thing is; it has function.
OK, so this solves it :)
I was thinking about something else; for example, on http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/account there is this example: "A beggarly account of empty boxes. - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, V-i"; but I understand now it is going to be just a part of "meaningtext". I'm not so certain, but maybe it would be good to create a separate table for examples, because same examples could (and probably will) be used in "meaningtext"s in different languages. It would also make it easier to automatically add new examples (for example, by grepping Project Gutenberg ;)
"A beggarly account of empty boxes" is a quote and why not have it as a seperate Word and marked as such ?? It would be a idiom for "account" and this is linked through Relation. Many famous quotes have been translated and we could have them all. (Een paard , een paard, een koninkrijk voor een paard)
Because, ideally each word (in each language) should have an example or two, and so the number of examples would approach the number of words; and, it would become impossible to distinguish between notable quotes (Kingdom for a horse!), which occur frequently, need a description, and need to be canonically translated, and non-notable quotes, which are in the wiktionary only to be used as examples of use for other words, need not have a description, and translators won't encounter them at all.
I do not think grepping Project Gutenberg makes much sense. If anything it helps you find occurances of the word but you have to be selective of what to include. That is an editorial process and just the fact that a word is used does not make for a good idiom in the UW.
I think it would make sense for rarer words, which might occur once or a few times in entire Gutenberg's corpus. Of course, at the end a human editor has to decide whether a quote is really relevant.
Related to grepping Project Gutenberg, have you considered adding information on word frequency? Only a single new table is needed, "frequency", with fields "spellingID", "corpus" and "frequency"; eventually "corpus" colud become "corpusID".
Once the UW is up and running, how hard would it be to make such changes?
When I was referring to "dialect", I did not have in mind a dialect that is officially recognised, but simply a set of words which could be identified as belonging to a certain group. So if you want to say that this word was part of London dockworkers' slang in 1800s, you should be able to do so, and not just stamp it with "British English".
When there are words that are specific to London dockworkers in the 1800s, I would not call it a dialect because like many professions they have there own vocabulary. These I would mark within a collection as the bulk of what they say would be London English of the 1800s. Now there is
I agree, it is not a dialect, but if some words are recognisable as belonging to a distinctive group of words, they should somehow be marked as belonging to it, and I was suggesting that they are marked in a same way they would be marked as belonging to a certain dialect. Another solution would be to use "wordrelation" table instead, even though it isn't meant to be used in that way :)
one thing that is relevant, the UW wants all words of all languages but its primary purpose it to have the current vocabulary. So yes, these words exist and have their place but when they are not used anymore they should be marked as such.
Well, just replace 1800s with 2000s and you still have the same problem :)
As a simple example, in Serbia, there are several publishing houses that were publishing Asterix, and in some translations "Idefix" is named "Garoviks" and "Panoramix" is named "Aspiriniks" while in others "Idefix" is named "Idefiks" and "Panoramix" is named "Panoramiks"; and this is consistent. If you are going to translate something about Asterix to Serbian, you should pick one of the translations, but you should be consistent in using only the words from the translation which you have picked, and they should somehow be marked as belonging to the same translation. There surely are more important things than Asterix where similar might apply.
Garoviks and Idefiks are for the Serbian language synonyms and as such I do not have to choose because they are both correct. As a matter of interest you could explain things either in the etymology or in the meaning of the word.
They are synonyms, but they are stylistically marked: it would be wrong to translate Idefix first as Garoviks and later as Idefiks, or to consistently translate Idefix with Idefiks but Panoramix with Aspiriniks, much as it would be wrong to write "I recognise you recognized me"; a translator has to choose and make the choice consistent.
Unrelated to any of the above, could you move "word" table a bit to the right, because currently it is hard to see what is relation between "word", "spelling" and "etymology" tables, the lines overlap.