Re: The new conjugator project

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

Thanks.  I know Arabic conjugation rules, but didn't know the
word.  BTW, Persian is not any like that, it uses
prefix/suffixes.

behdad


On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj wrote:

>
> --- 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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--behdad
  behdad.org