Comments on: Where’s The Verb?

By: Gordon P. Hemsley

Gordon P. Hemsley — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:35:03 +0000

It is arguable that the infinitive form in English is the form with 'to', while the imperative is the format without it. But, for the purposes of Ubiquity, that distinction probably doesn't matter.

By: Szabolcs

Szabolcs — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:56:27 +0000

@mitcho, I'll reply to the survey tomorrow. Until then, here are a few examples to illustrate what I mean:

translate this from English to French fordítsd ezt angolról franciára

translate this from French to English fordítsd ezt franciáról angolra

frodítsd = translate, 2nd person sg objective imperative (the presence of the object is marked on the verb) ezt = this, objective francia = French fraciáról = from French fraciára = to French

Note how the ending of "francia" changes, also influencing the last vowel of the word.

Another example:

send mail to Kata küldj levelet Katának

Note that the name Kata took a suffix, and the last vowel was changed: "Katának".

If we have a non-Hungarian name, e.g. Pete, than it would be

küldj levelet Pete-nek küldj levelet Petenek

Note that the final letter did not change here (in fact even though we write that E, no final vowel is pronounced). The proper way to attach suffixes to foreign names like this is to use a hyphen, "Pete-nek", but I'm not sure that people would be willing to do that consistently when typing quickly.

Now let's look at sentences like this one:

translate HELLO to French

These are a bit more complicated, and I am not yet sure how to translate them. The problem is that the object must get a suffix, but since in this case the object can be a longer piece of text, we cannot attach a suffix, so we have to use a more complicated construction ...

fordítsd franciára azt, hogy HELLO fordítsd azt fraciára, hogy HELLO

Other word orders are possible too, but I think that people are more likely to use one of these two in this particular context (word order can be used to stress a part of the sentence). Anyway, this looks too complicated, so the following might work better:

fordítsd franciára: HELLO

Literally,

translate (it/this) to french: HELLO

(I put "it/this" in parens there to show that the number and person of both the subject and the object are marked on the verb. But this isn't really relevant as the same verb is unlikely to be used both with and without and object in Ubiquity)

Another complication might be the use of verb-particles (I'm not sure what these are called in English). Another (very common) form of the verb "translate", "fordít", is "lefordít", with the particle "le". In this particular case the meaning of the two words is pretty much the same, but in most cases the particle is essential and cannot be omitted. The problem is that the particle will get detached in imperative:

translate this to French fordítsd ezt le franciára fordítsd le ezt franciára

Both word orders are equally likely for this context.

Mitcho, do you think that these problems can be solved?

By: calosgheros

calosgheros — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:40:09 +0000

In italian we use the imperative form (ex. cerca [search it], traduci [translate it]) and the verb always comes first (ex. cerca-lo su google [search it in google])

By: mitcho

mitcho — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:24:01 +0000

@Szabolcs, thanks for the comment again. It's a great question—an important issue—and I'll hope to dedicate a blog post to agglutinative case marking in the near future. If you want me to take a look at Hungarian in particular, I'd appreciate it if you (or another speaker) could reply to the survey posted a couple days ago.

By: mitcho

mitcho — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:22:08 +0000

Olivier, Benoit, sorry about that French example. It was wrong but also a bad example… so I changed it to "mange-le!" This is a better example as you actually see that there's a separate imperative form, contrasting with the regular second person singular conjugation ("manges"). Thanks for the correction!

@Benoit - your point about the infinitive is duly noted… we definitely want to be able to support these other "natural" options as well. I'd love to see you fill out the survey!

By: Benoit

Benoit — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:26:32 +0000

Your French example for "Do it!" should be "Fais-le !" (informal) or "Faites-le !" (formal).

When talking to a computer though, I think people would rather type "Faire xxx" (infinitive) than use an imperative. The infinitive would actually imply "I want you to …".

I'll try to complete your survey for French but I feel it's going to be complicated

By: Olivier

Olivier — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:48:20 +0000

Just a small correction on your example of an imperative form : "do it" in French would be "fais-le". Very interesting series of posts, BTW.

By: Szabolcs

Szabolcs — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:34:35 +0000

Again, my question is: how are you going to deal with agglutinative or highly inflecting languages, where morphological analysis seems unavoidable? English has a very reduced grammar, so you can figure most things out from the word order. But e.g. in Hungarian, the word order gives little information.

By: Wladimir Palant

Wladimir Palant — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:27:21 +0000

Russian has both the infinitive and the imperative form though the latter would probably be more natural for Ubiquity. The verb comes first in both cases:

Infinitive: Искать адрес на Гугле Imperative: Ищи адрес на Гугле