On Sun, Aug 05, 2001 at 03:57:36PM -0400, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
> I have Gordon's book as well. I spent a great deal of time trying to write
> a java program that would enable me to enter the 'base' words (the ones that
> aren't inflected, plural, etc.,) and use them as database keys. My hope was
> to have a category for each word. Based on that category I wanted to define
> all the possible variants of the word. What I came to realize was that I
> don't know nearly as much as I thought I did about grammar.
Interesting idea. Quite complicated; there are lots of little variances
in conjugation, declension, etc., that seem to be practically intuitive
once you've memorized enough paradigms, but not at all natural until then.
I know that when I first started, my biggest problem with Gordon's
conjugations was that it was totally non-obvious to me which category
should contain some newly encountered word. Even when I'd managed
to guess its root form, and confirm that with a dictionary.
And my secondary problem was that they all seemed horribly different.
There were all these a's and e's and รถ's getting mixed in peculiar
ways, and j's and v's being inserted and deleted willy nilly. Even when
I got to Haukur's lesson on umlaut (aka i-mutation and u-mutation),
which explained a lot of this, I still couldn't seem to figure out how
they'd apply in any particular case, unless that case was pretty simple.
And of course not being able to express the rules logically myself,
I wouldn't have been able to program them into a computer.
That's changed somewhat, after memorizing a lot of individual declensions
and conjugations. I find that the new ones are easier, because I now have
a pretty good intuition for what would be "right" for a word with that
particular spelling and gender. Still not perfect though, which is why
I still need to memorize them.
> One thing I would like to see is something similar to:
>
> http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/english/2000/icel/idunn/index.html
>
> But with more information, such as the kind I failed to determine with this
> effort:
>
> http://www.geocities.com/valfather_1066/norse/havamal-001.html
Wow, that sure looks like a lot of work went into it.
Would comments be useful to you, or feel like nasty criticism?
(Note: I'm no expert on ON, but I'm seeing things that I could
fill in for you, and some that look incorrect.)
> WRT the database: what I was trying to do for each 'base' word (I don't know
> if there's a better term) was to develop a graph of all the different
> categories and sub-categories. It actually form a tree which goes kind of
> like this:
[details snipped]
>What I found is that I really don't know enough to complete
> this task.
>
> I don't know if I'm making any sense in all of this. I also don't know if
> the task has a return value equal to the time investment. Of course the web
> page I'm suggesting would not require the database, or even the graph that
> underlies it. I do believe a visual depiction of such a graph would be
> useful.
I've been playing with similar things, as has at least one other member
of this list. I'm pretty sure there's a good return on investment for
the person doing the work, as they learn an awful lot in the process.
What I'm not sure is whether the result would be useful to anyone else;
so far, my work in progress is not at a stage where it's useful, and
I don't have all the knowledge I'd need to get it to that stage.
--
Arlie
(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)