Re: Making this List more Useful

On Monday 06 August 2001 15:11, you wrote:

> <html><body>
> <tt>
> 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 
>

Selv,

When I started working on that project I found it to be far more challenging
than I had expected. It sounds to me you have a better grasp of the subject
than I have. When I stepped back from the database project, I decided to try
and map out what I wanted using a filesystem directory structure, and then
using html files to hold the actual node information. I left that set for a
while as well. I came back to it today. The first thing I decided to do was
to create an outline of the categories in which the base words should go. I
put the first draft up on the web so people can look at it. I plan on
creating some frames and link to other files containing the morphological
variations of the words for each category. It seems different parts of
speech will require different treatments. For example, nouns will simply be
listed in tables corresponding to their strength and stem; verbs will
probably be treated as individual files in a manner similar to my _501 German
Verbs_ book; adjectives don't seem to have an existence of their own, so I'm
not sure how to treat them.

Anyhow, here's the page:
http://members.bellatlantic.net/~hattons/norse/grammar/outline.html

It's based on Gordon's Book. I hope to have some more stuff fleshed out
soon. People are free to copy any of the content on the page, and do what
they like with it. I welcome feedback which may help improve the content.
Jut bear in mind that this is very much a part time project which I man not
be able to give consistent attention.

Steven