English to Polish

From Apertium
Revision as of 09:37, 10 October 2007 by Jimregan (talk | contribs) (→‎Articles: change the example from 'beer' to 'clock', as beer is typically spoken of in quantities (well, I know ''I'' do :))
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Morphology

Nouns

Verbs

Polish has typically two forms for each verb, the perfective and the imperfective aspect. These usually come with a change in stem, for example:

Imperfective Perfective Gloss
widzieć zobaczyć to see
stawiać postawić to set up

The perfective denotes a completed action. According to Wikipedia, "The aspectual distinctions exist on the lexical level — there is no unique method to form a perfective verb from a given imperfective one."[1]

Apertium notes

As this is lexicalised, there is only one way to deal with it, and that is in the dictionaries, each verb will have two entries in the bilingual dictionary, one for perfective and one for imperfective.

For example:

    <e><p><l>read<s n="vblex"/></l><r>czytać<s n="vblex"/><s n="imperf"/></r></p></e>
    <e><p><l>read<s n="vblex"/></l><r>przeczytać<s n="vblex"/><s n="perf"/></r></p></e>

Syntax

Articles

Polish doesn't have articles, so translating English→Polish, we'll need to remove them, translating Polish→English, we'll need to add them.

   Mam               zegar
   mieć+p1.sg.pres 
   have+I            clock+nom
`I have a clock'
Apertium notes

There aren't really any rules to this, so the fallback will be "if we can't tell for sure, leave them out".

Word order

Basic English and Polish word order are the same, SVO; however, as Polish morphology details the part of speech, Polish word order can vary to provide emphasis.

"Ja kocham Ciebie" = "I love you"

"Ciebie ja kocham" = "I love you"

Notes