# Word inflection with smart paradigms

Give language, part of speech, and one or more word forms, to obtain the inflection table.

Examples:

      Eng N baby
      Fin V odottaa odotti
      Fre V manger
      Ger N Soldat Soldaten _masculine
      Hin N बच्छा
      Jpn V 答える _Gr2
      Lat A vetus veteris

Thus notice that strings are given without quotes, but features are prefixed with an underscore `_`.

## Languages and part of speech tags

The available languages are:

      Afr Amh Cat Dan Dut Eng Fin Fre Ger Hin Ina Ita Jpn Lat
      Lav Nep Nor Pes Pnb Ron Rus Snd Spa Swe Tha Tur Urd

In addition, the library has the languages `Ara Bul Pol`, but they are not yet available in this way; you can however use the full form of paradigm applications prefixed by "!" as described below.

The parts of speech are: N (= noun), A (= adjective), V (= verb).

The way this works is that the program constructs the most probable inflection table from the forms given. For a vast majority of words in all languages, it is enough to give just one form. But sometimes more forms are needed to get the inflection table right.

This is a front end to the Paradigms modules in the GF Resource Grammar. See RGL Synopsis for more information on available languages and paradigms.

## Filtering with patterns

You may not want to see the whole table. Then you can filter it with patterns, each of which works like "grep", using `*` to match any substring, either in the features or in the forms:

      Eng N baby -Gen
      Eng V die -dy*

If several pattern are given, they are applied in conjunction. Patterns prefixed with a tilde `~` rather than a hyphen `-` are checked for not matching. Thus the search

      Eng N baby -Gen ~Pl

selects the lines that contain `Gen` but not `Pl`.

## Using custom paradigms

(For GF experts.) If you want to use other paradigms than the smart `mk` paradigms, you can prefix your input with `!` and use the normal expression syntax of GF. For example:

      ! Ara brkN "طير" "فَعل" "فُعُول" Masc NoHum
      ! Bul mkN041 "птица"
      ! Pol mkRegAdj "duży" "większy" "dużo" "więcej"

This also allows you to use structured terms:

      ! Ger prefixV "auf" (mkV "fassen")

## To do

- nicer input helped by menus
- error handling and reporting when some language doesn't follow the format assumed here
- better documentation of the paradigms

Powered by GF. Aarne Ranta 2012.

Last modified: Wed Sep 12 14:24:51 CEST 2012