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.

Arlie replied:

>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've been thinking about how to structure a similar site, except using
MySQL and PHP - I figure by making separate databases for each type of
noun, verb, etc, I can program the conjugation rules into the PHP
interface, and just make the database entries as strings of root words and
declinated endings, and then it can search multiple databases for all the
words which could be conjugated into a particular form - so if you typed in
"sé", for example, it would not only give you which base words can produce
that form, but exactly which form it would be. Once the initial version is
in place, it could in theory get more advanced and be possible to enter in
a sentence and have it determine which forms are correct by comparing them
to the other words in the sentence and picking the ones that have cases
which agree...

but first I need to create the database structure and doing some data
entry, taking full advantage of all the Old Norse dictionaries I have at my
disposal (I have la Farge, de Vries, Gordon, Vigfusson, Zoëga,
Valfells-Cathey, Barnes... um, I should probably stop before someone sends
a raiding party to Seattle ;-)

-Selv

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