Agglutination
Revision as of 11:21, 28 March 2009 by Francis Tyers (talk | contribs)
Both the current Apertium system and the suggested plugin system face another set of difficulties with agglutinative languages like Quechua.
Existing tools
Example
For instance:
- wasi — house
- wasikuna — houses
- wasita — to the house
- wasikunata — to the houses
- wasiy — my house
- wasiita — to my house
- wasiikuna — my houses
- wasiikunata — to my houses
- wasinchik — our house
- wasinchikta — to our house
- wasinchikkunata — to our houses
Or Basque:
- etxea la casa
- etxe gorria la casa roja
- etxe gorri zaharra la casa roja y vieja
- etxe gorri zaharrarekin con la casa roja y vieja
- etxe gorri zaharrarentzat para la casa roja y vieja
This sort of complex would actually fit quite well into the current Apertium model, although each paradigm would have a great number of possible members due to the large numbers of suffixes (and this is complicated by the fact that suffix order is variable). It could also be handled by form generation, again with the drawback that many thousands of possible forms would need to be generated.