Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian and Macedonian

Generic questions

• Should the order of tags for nouns and adjectives be the same, e.g. gender.number.case, or gender.case.number?

Serbo-Croatian to Macedonian

Prepositions

'na' and 'u'

Deciding between if something should be in the accusative or locative after 'na' is a problem.

"The prepositions na, u have locative case for position, accusative case for motion"

So one way of fixing this would be to have a variable for "position/motion" in the transfer and set it to "position" after a noun, and "motion" after a verb. For example:

Šumski požar na hrvatskom    otoku
adj    n     pr adj          n
Forest fire  on croatian-LOC island-LOC

Idem         na hrvatski     otok
vblex        pr adj          n
I go         to croatian-ACC island-ACC

Of course there are a million counter examples, but if we choose randomly we get 50%, adding this we can increase the accuracy a bit. Another thing to do would be to add information regarding the verb being used, e.g. distinguish between a small set of "movement verbs" and others. This could also increase accuracy.

Tenses

Future

The future tense in Serbo-Croatian is analytic formed with the modal hoću ("will"). This verb has clitic forms, which inflect: ću, ćeš, će, ćemo, ćete, će. Complicating this, the orthography is different between the East and West standards. East has the clitic joined to the verb, however it can also appear detached. West has the clitic only detached.

Examples

East	West	Gloss
čitaću	čitat ću	(I) will read
ću čitati	ću čitati	(I) will read
videćemo	vidjet ćemo	(We) will see
ćemo videti	ćemo vidjeti	(We) will see

Macedonian to Serbo-Croatian

Verbs

Non-finite

There are various ways in which a verb can be changed into another part of speech that are regular, take for example the verb "gali" (to caress):

Verbal adverb	galejĸi	adv
Verbal noun	galenje	n.nt.sp
L-participle (Verbal adjective)	galen	vblex.lp.f.sg
	galena	vblex.lp.m.sg
	galeno	vblex.lp.nt.sg
	galeni	vblex.lp.mf.pl

"The present active participle survives as the verbal adverb. The past passive participle survives as the verbal adjective, which inflects and behaves like any other adjective and can be formed from any verb, including intransitives. The resultative participle survives as the verbal l-form, which is limited to the sum series, the imal perfect, and the hypothetical conditional."

Tenses

Imperfect

The imperfect tense in Macedonian should be translated as the conjugated form of biti plus the L-participle in Serbo-Croatian, e.g.

беше

е+pii.p3.sg

je bio

biti+pri.p3.sg biti+lp.m.sg

Note the problem of gender of the L-participle.

Known bugs

• vreme/vrijeme will do hyperijekavianism when generating West forms.

External links

• Wikipedia: Differences in standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian
• Croatian dictionary (with inflections) — find the definition and click on izvedeni oblici