Roman wrote:
2) ...
Since verbs have no plural and nouns have no past, one could actually use the plural column for that, unless it would create problems elsewhere.
It is certainly technically possible, but I doubt if it's worth the effort of fetching the distinction between verb and noun elsewhere (in the metadata table) in order to determine the meaning of that column.
Incidentally, this is a good example of the central dilemma of database design: the choice between making the model as small, flexible and appropriate as possible, and considerations like performance speed and readability.
Roman wrote:
I don't know what 'hints' are in this context (...)
Eryniel and I were talking about 'hints' the other day. I thought that she had used that in a previous post, but I can't find it now. What we mean is "translation alternatives" like in
Eryniel wrote:
- the other suggestion was to display not only the sindarin word if you search for a translation in german, but also all possible translation alternatives. For example: you enter Ruhm" as search word and would get something like: aglar - Glanz, Ruhm (sources)...
Roman wrote:but if you type in 'glory', you should get all the entries in full where 'glory' appears in the translations.
The thing is that you have to take the meaning of a Sindarin word from the overlap of the English translations. For example, 'appear' can be used in the sense 'seem', or in the sense 'come into sight' (as in 'Hamlet appeared on the stage'). The Sindarin word thia- has only the former meaning as seen by the gloss 'seem, appear'. If you look for 'appear' and just get thia-, you may be misled into using it in the latter sense. So the English-Sindarin wordlist is deprecated, if you will.
OK, that makes a lot of sense indeed. I'm thinking about what to do about it.
In the given example it's like this:
to appear ->
thia- ->
to appear
thia- ->
to seem
The English meaning
to appear is ambivalent. Too bad there isn't a Sindarin word for the 'coming into sight' meaning of
to appear .. I'm trying to think of other cases where this might be the case.
But for the time being, imagine there would be a Sindarin word that meant
coming into sight - say,
autha-, searching for
to appear could be made to yield these results:
to appear ->
thia- ->
to appear (thia-) in the meaning of 'to seem'
thia- ->
to appear (autha-) in the meaning of 'to come into sight'
thia- ->
to seem (thia-)
It won't be too hard to make it so, because the links are already there. It's just a matter of following it one step further.
But in the existing example, it wouldn't work because there is no Sindarin word available (yet) which has the meaning of 'to come into sight'. Still, someone might be tempted to use
thia- in that sense, because of their experience with English, and not realising that meanings may cover different ground in Sindarin.
The point is that in the cases that there is no Sindarin word for the different meanings of a given English (or German) word, this information is not contained within the dataset as it is now, and it would have to be added.
Am I correct to assume that it comes down to this question:
do we want to explicitly warn the user for cases like this, where there is a chance that they would use a Sindarin word in the wrong meaning of a given English/German word which also has a Sindarin equivalent with the correct meaning?
It could be added to the Commentary of the translation (the combination of a Sindarin and a German/English word); or maybe it's better to add it to the Sindarin entry itself maybe?
Roman wrote:potential future past tenses
Fascinating.
It is, isn't it
Douglas Adams, in 'the Restaurant at the End of the Universe', wrote: (...)
The major problem (of time travel) is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term Future Perfect has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
Good luck with the move!