Separable verbs
Revision as of 22:15, 7 August 2007 by Francis Tyers (talk | contribs)
Apertium may have some problems when dealing with separable verbs. Separable verbs are verbs that are formed with a verb stem, and a particle. For futher information see Wikipedia article here. These exist in most Germanic languages, and also languages such as Hungarian.
For example, in Afrikaans, the verb "to announce" is "aankondig". The usage is as follows:
- Sterrekundiges kondig [die ontdekking] aan.
- Astronomers announce [the discovery].
The stem "kondig" does not by itself mean anything, only in conjunction with the particle "aan", however this is not always the case. The past participle is formed by inserting "ge" in between the particle and the stem, for example:
- Sterrekundiges het [die ontdekking] aangekondig.
- Astronomers have announced [the discovery].
See also
Further reading
- ten Hacken, P. and Bopp, S. (1998) "Separable Verbs in a Reusable Morphological Dictionary for German". Proceedings of the 36th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 471 - 475
