Re: The new conjugator project

[Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj <alarfaj0 at yahoo dot com>]

--- Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu> wrote:
> 
> BTW, what is a "conjugator"?
> 

A conjugator, put simply, is something that conjugates :). To be more exact,
conjugation is the act of getting one form of a verb from the root or from
another form. English has irregular conjugation rules, but mostly you conjugate
by simply adding suffixes. Arabic is a different matter altogether because it
doesn't use prefixes or suffixes, it uses infixes. I don't know what the
situation is in Persian, but its probably similiar to Arabic. An example:

The root verb for "write" in Arabic, is ka-ta-ba (كَتَبَ). To "conjugate"
it to the male present plural form, for example, you add a "ya" at the
beginning, put a hamza on the first letter, a dhamma on the second (not always)
and third, and the waw+noon combo representative of a group of males. You get
ya-k-tu-buun (يَكْتُبُون) and that is how you conjugate a verb! The
aim of this project is to create a program to do this automatically. If you
give it "kataba" and say you want the male present plural, it should be able to
output yaktubun by applying the above rules. Same goes for all forms of a verb,
which I believe there 16 of them in Arabic.

Thanks for making me write this! It'll go into the README :)

Abdulaziz,


	
		
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