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Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

alexharri.com

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Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#3
I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it.

When I started learning Russian, the declensions (like the ones mentioned in the article) really threw me for a loop. I looked all over for a similar app to explain the patterns and drill rote practice, but never found one.

While slightly off-topic, does anyone know of such an app (web-based or macOS/iOS)?

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#4

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it. When I…

https://memrussian.com/?

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#5
post #4

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it. When I…

https://memrussian.com/ ?

Grandfather talks about classical Windows software. On the Play Store this app says "Contains ads - In-app purchases".

Ah, as a cheap bastard, I hate how software was pay once back then, and for this one I'm just going to ask you what's the monthly subscription price?

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#9
No idea if Rails copes with this automatically, but it feels like the sort of magic it’s historically been really good at. I remember reading the source code for `pluralise` and finding that someone had encoded the pluralisation rules including irregular cases for Welsh.

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#10
For the 800 names that were missing declension data in the database, it seems like the most straightforward thing to do would be to assign their declensions by hand. It shouldn't take a native speaker more than a couple of hours (if some name they haven't seen before is ambiguous, then whatever they guess at least won't sound obviously wrong to other native speakers). Alternatively, very cheap to ask an LLM to do it.

Encoding them into a trie like this would still be a good way to distribute the result, but you don't have to rely on the trie also being a good way to guess the declensions.

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