Pronoun Paradigms

Many of you know that Numen provides a beta paradigm feature. The paradigms of most nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns are available. Generally, they work very well with a couple of well known exceptions (Greek nouns, certain verbal forms, and some irregular forms).

Once upon a time, the pronouns were working fairly well but not so much recently. Over the past few months there has been an uptick in the number of reports of bad pronoun paradigms. After a thorough review, I must note that all pronoun paradigms were broken. Honestly, I'm not sure how that happened. Nonetheless, I took some corrective action this weekend and fixed most of the pronoun paradigms -- with the exception of the personal pronouns. Those will take a bit more work because as you probably know, personal pronouns are the only nominal forms in Latin that don't have explicit gender (i.e., tu does not code for masculine, feminine, or neuter).

So in the meantime, please feel free to spot-check the paradigms for your favorite pronouns and please feel free to report errors. PS, it's always helpful to cite your source if you believe that a paradigm has an incorrect form. Sources do vary!

Some 2nd Conjugation Errors

I'm sure most of our regular visitors have noticed a button to report errors that occur in Latin words. We have a great community here and many of you report errors regularly.

One of those errors recently reported was the verb mereō. It turns out that when the dictionary was originally loaded into the database, a few errors crept in. This is normal and as I find the errors, I correct them.

When I was correcting mereō today, I wondered if it were possible that more 2nd conjugation verbs were erroneous -- often there is a pattern caused by a programming bug or a data encoding error. After running a quick database query, I discovered that there were indeed 20 or so 2nd conjugation verbs that were listed as 1st or 3rd.

The explanation is simple: in the Lewis Elementary dictionary, occasionally the compound verbs are listed without a macron in the infinitive (exempli gratiā, inhaereō). It is so rare that I never programmed an exception to the rule that said "if an infinitive has a macron, make the verb 2nd conjugation."

So needless to say I fixed those 20 verbs. Despite that these errors happen every once in a while, I feel that more than 95% of the words in the database are happily error free. Nevertheless, please do continue reporting errors. Someday I'd like to see this dictionary approach 99%+ error-free entries!

Paradigms! Paradigms! Paradigms! (Verbs)

Good news! I made two changes to errata in the verb paradigms this week.

1. Someone with a real eagle eye noticed that the ... ahem (this is a mouthful!) ... third person plural future passive imperative was listed in the space reserved for second person plural future passive imperative. Oh my! There is no second person plural future passive imperative! :) (New Latin Grammar, Page 72). 
2. The verb paradigms for the fero class of verbs included an incorrectly formed gerund/gerundive (future passive participle). That is now fixed.

As usual, most of the corrections to this Lexicon go on daily. I usually correct between 5 and 10 errors per day. Thanks for all those eagle eyes out there spotting typos, errors, and database mistakes! 

Deponent Verbs

A user pointed out to me that deponent verbs were not showing up properly in the search and browse areas of the site. For example, "conor" was being displayed as "cono". The reason for this is because the parsing engine sees all verbs the same: active, deponent and semi-deponent. It knows they are different because they have flags marking them deponent and semi-deponent.

Long story short, I kludged the user interface to display deponents as they typically appear in most Latin lexica. I hope this helps! Enjoy!

Perfect Syncopation

Look at this:

18204 total word(s)
17369 word(s) found
20 word(s) not found
815 word(s) ignored
0.11% of words not found
4.48% of words ignored
3264 unique word(s)

But what does it mean???

Well, I've just run the word analysis tool on Livy Ab Urbe Condita Book 2. The important thing to note is that out of eighteen thousand words, only 20 weren't parsed and found in the dictionary. That's pretty much amazing.

How did this happen? Well, two things had to happen. First, I ignore capitalized words that weren't located in the dictionary. Essentially, I'm ignoring proper names and place names. Second, I programmed Numen's ability to parse syncopated perfect verbs: laudasse (laudavisse), norat (noverat), et cetera.

I still have a bit of testing to do to make sure I didn't break anything, but this was one of the few major hurdles that I needed to overcome to get a nearly perfect parsing engine!

Verb Paradigms

As I promised, I've been working on verb paradigms. As of now, they're up and running. Just search for any Latin word and click "see the complete paradigm".

Most verbs show up just fine, but of course some irregular verbs will show odd glitches. Therefore the data is "beta" but the paradigms should still prove helpful.

Here are some caveats:

• certain irregular verbs will have weird forms, for instance, the participles for esse (which didn't exist until late antiquity).
• deponent verbs will show active forms. Remember that deponent verbs do have active participles, and the imperfect subjunctive is formed from the "reconstructed" active infinitive. I'm trying to imagine a way to "gray-out" the unused active forms, but I haven't decided fully on that yet.
  
• as a result of deponent verbs having "active" forms, they are now stored in the dictionary in their active forms, although on flashcards they will still show their deponent forms. So for instance sequor will be searchable under sequo.
  
• unusual forms, such as dic, duc, and fac will show up as dice, duce, and face. I haven't implemented and "irregular forms" system yet, even though I've half mapped it out. UPDATE: It turns out that Plautus was fond of using forms like dice, duce, and face even though they were later rejected by Terence.
  
• UPDATE: Some forms which are not known to exist (in other words, we don't have a record of them) but can logically be deduced will show up on the paradigm charts. For instance, the rare future active participle of volo, voliturus shows up and so does it's non-extant future active infinitive voliturus esse. Many grammar books will not show these forms simply because we don't have a record of them. Nonetheless, it is logical to assume they existed or would have been known to exist during Roman times (at least in theory).
  

So, work continues! Enjoy.

Paradigm Updates

I spent a few minutes today and added the demonstrative pronouns is, iste and idem and the paradigms for R type possessive pronouns noster and vester/voster. I also added the three defective verbs, coepi, odi and memini. Finally, I added the eo and ferre verb conjugations.

Prettying up the Joint

So I haven't had as much free time as I wanted this week. I've been busy at my day job getting everything "taken care of" before my last day there on August 13th. After that, I'll just be contracting with them for 5 hours a week, because I'll be a full time teaching and grading assistant for the University of New Mexico Foreign Languages and Literatures Department. I'm pretty excited about that!

Nevertheless, I had a few hours free tonight, so I did some sprucing up. I made some icons, fixed some style sheets and squashed some small bugs. There are a few things I want to include before the semester starts:

• Add a few pronoun paradigms: is and iste for sure.
  
• Add some verb paradigms: perhaps volo verbs.
• Fix up the database backend, especially in the realm of update cascades (it's technical, and you're probably wondering what that means -- don't worry, it'll make things better).
• Speed up the morphology lookup. It's not slow by any means, coming in at approximately 100 milliseconds per word. But still, I think I can get it down to 40ms. Every bit helps, especially if this site ever gets popular!
• Make a new database and web server. Right now it's being graciously hosted at the place I work here on campus (Natural Heritage New Mexico). I've been the system admin there for about 5 years, but now -- as I wrote earlier in this post -- I won't be there for very much longer.
  

I'm sure there's more to update, but I think it's time to take a break for the evening. Enjoy!