Approximate English translations of inflected forms

[eddieantonio]

This seems to be really desired! We may be able to provide approximate English translations of inflected wordforms.

e.g.,

"nimowâw" — "I eat s.o. (animate)"
"kimowâw" — "You eat s.o. (animate)"
"mowêw" — "s/he eats s.o. (animate)"

... with a BIG caveat that usage may not be the same as it is in English (some words are only used as question, some words are only used by members of a specific gender). It's something really hard to do 100%, but somewhat doable for the 20% that matters.

[aarppe]

I've done some gawk scripting with Wolvengrey's dictionary, where we have parsed the English glosses. In that case, it does seem that we could actually provide English translations by some clever scripting and the listing (or FST-generation) of the inflected forms of the nouns and verbs in the dictionary sources (totally doable).

However, doing this generally would likely require adding translation templates to the *.paradigm files, which would indicate per each paradigm cell which English inflected noun/verb form is required in a particular slot, with the rest of the context generated dynamically based on the POS coding (e.g. s/he_PRON_SUBJ would be replaced by the subject-pronoun indicated for that cell, s.o._PRON with the object pronoun for that cell, etc.).

The additional information in the *.paradigm files could be something like the following for TA verbs:

{{ lemma }}+V+TA+Ind+Prs+2Sg+1SgO: SUBJ:{I}+OBJ:{you (one)}+PRED:V+Pres
{{ lemma }}+V+TA+Ind+Prs+3Sg+4Sg/PlO: SUBJ:{s/he}+OBJ:{someone else}+PRED:V+Pres+3Sg

{{ lemma }}+V+TA+Ind+Prt+2Sg+1SgO: SUBJ:{I}+OBJ:{you (one)}+PRED:V+Past
{{ lemma }}+V+TA+Ind+Prt+3Sg+4Sg/PlO: SUBJ:{s/he}+OBJ:{someone else}+PRED:V+Past

Then, the English glosses which have been POS-tagged will be edited on the fly with the above information, e.g. for wâpamêw:

wâpamêw: s/he_PRON_SUBJ sees#see_V s.o.PRON , s/he_PRON_SUBJ witnesses#witness_V s.o._PRON
s/he_PRON_SUBJ <- SUBJ:{...}
s.o._PRON <- OBJ:{...}
lemma_V <- lemma:PRES{...}

The other verbs should be simpler cases of the above. Special cases are reflexives, and the future conditionals and infinitives.