Frederik has been working on a nifty feature for Parley. (Expect some more Parley posts from me highlighting some of the cool new stuff in trunk as soon as I find the time.)
When creating a new vocabulary file you are asked to fill in a few things about the languages you are going to practice. This includes stuff like personal pronouns and tenses for example. Now we are all lazy, right? Everyone filling in those details over and over again doesn’t sound very clever, does it?
New nifty feature to the rescue! It allows Parley to automatically fetch this stuff from the internet. Sweet!
And this is where you can help. We need those definitions for a lot of languages or at least the most common ones to get it started. We already have files for English, German, Spanish, French and Latin. Help us make this rock by following these simple steps:
- install Parley from trunk and open it
- create a new document from the welcome screen
- fill in the details in the properties dialog that pops up, add the language you want to provide as the first language and keep the “Setup Grammar Details” checkbox checked
- klick ok
- fill in all the needed details for the first language paying special attention to personal pronouns*
- klick ok
- save it
- send it to me by email (lydia at kde.org)
- get yourself a cookie 😉
If you don’t have Parley from trunk but want to help you can also provide me with the needed info and I will create the file for you.
* Real world testing has shown that the dialog has usability issues. We are working on a fix. The short version: Only check the “Male/female have different conjugations” and “A neutral conjugation form exists” checkboxes if verb conjugation differs between male, female and neutral in the third person. If they are the same like in English write them into the first box (like this: he/she/it) and do not check the checkboxes.
I can help you with a Dutch one, If you tell my what data you need.
Just mail me at kristof.bal at gmail.com
Hi Lydia,
I don’t have trunk installed on my laptop, but would love to help. I can give you what you need for Norwegian if you send me (or post) a sample config file or just a list of the information you need.
Tom
I would like to help with Swedish gramar files, but as Swedish has a few linguistic quirks, I wonder if you have support for it:
In Swedish there are two (2) words genders but four (4) pronouns.
The first gender is usually called utrium or N-gender, and has three pronouns (“han”, “hon” and “den”, matching the English “he”, “she” and “it”, respectively). In some older texts N-gender is divided into maskulinum, feminimum and reale, but as the only thing differeing is the pronoun, that is somewhat overkill.
The second gender is usually called neutrum or T-gender, and has only one pronoun (“det”, matching the english “it”).
All words that are male or female in English are N-gender in Swedish, but words that are neutral in English can be either either N-gender or T-gender. The only way to know which is by experience.
In adition to the pronoun, there is more stuff that change by genus. This includes the indefinite article, the Swedish word endings equivalent to the definite article, as well as the plural endings.
Looking indefinite singlular, definite singlular, indefinite plural and definite plural you get the following typical series:
English: “a(n) ~”, “the ~”, “~(e)s”, “the ~(e)s”
N-gender: “en ~”, “~en”, “~er”, “~erna”
T-gender: “ett ~”, “~et”, “~”, “~en”
Ofcourse, just as in English, words ending with a wovel will upset this, and there are ofcourse exceptions to the rule…