Agglutinative Language
en.wikipedia.org
Agglutinative Language
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Re: Agglutinative Language
#2Turkish is probably strict enough to be used as a programming language. The only downside is that its vocabulary is utterly alien for most speakers of Latin/Anglo-Saxon languages aside from some borrowed words from French and Arabic.
Re: Agglutinative Language
#3Turkish is probably strict enough to be used as a programming language. The only downside is that its vocabulary is utterly alien for most speakers of Latin/Anglo-Saxon languages aside from some borrowed words from French and Arabic.
It's actually quite a bit easier to learn since it has few false friends with Latin languages. I often thought search engines written by English speakers focused on bags of words can't work very well in Turkish though?
Re: Agglutinative Language
#4I was just reading this yesterday after the term came up in a Japanese grammar book.
Re: Agglutinative Language
#5Can someone here explain this in an easier to understand way? This was a bit too dense for my understanding...
Re: Agglutinative Language
#6Turkish is probably strict enough to be used as a programming language. The only downside is that its vocabulary is utterly alien for most speakers of Latin/Anglo-Saxon languages aside from some borrowed words from French and Arabic.
It's actually quite a bit easier to learn since it has few false friends with Latin languages. I often thought search engines written by English speakers focused on bags of words can't work very well in Turkish though?
Not only search, but also autocorrect. Turkish autocorrect on iOS is a flaming disaster even after a decade.
Here’s a real (if unlikely) word in Turkish and how this whole agglutination business works: https://twitter.com/languagecrawler/status/62385880386859827...
I don’t blame Apple though - it might actually be just impossible to do Turkish autocorrect in the same way English autocorrect works, because the beginning of the word indicates the actual word but the end indicates everything else (direction, modifiers etc.). So it’s about as easy/hard as English to guess the beginning of the word, but impossible to guess the modifiers that get added because the moment the modifier sequence starts, every single letter starts to change the meaning, thus there are almost no incorrect paths. A correct Turkish autocorrect implementation would autocomplete the word root, but leave at the halfway-compete word at where the modifier suffixes start so that the user can complete the modifier sequence on his / her own.
Re: Agglutinative Language
#7More broadly, synthetic languages are like statically-typed programming languages, whereas analytic languages[1] are like dynamically-typed programming languages.
Also, intransitive verbs[2] are like thunks.
Re: Agglutinative Language
#8Can someone here explain this in an easier to understand way? This was a bit too dense for my understanding...
Simply put: a lot of grammar is based on appending to words. E.g. the Turkish word for book is Kitab (shared by a bunch of other middle eastern languages too). My Book is Kitabim. Your book is Kitabsin. (Note last example is vastly simplified, a proper Turkish speaker should correct it)
It allows for a lot of really short sentences; here's a nonsensical example:
His book is on fire - kitabı yanıyor.
The word endings is sufficient to provide context and meaning.
If you find Turkish to be too difficult to learn, try Malay. It's also agglutinative and used by ~300 million people (Malay and Indonesian are for all practical purposes the same language).
Re: Agglutinative Language
#9Turkish is probably strict enough to be used as a programming language. The only downside is that its vocabulary is utterly alien for most speakers of Latin/Anglo-Saxon languages aside from some borrowed words from French and Arabic.
It's actually quite a bit easier to learn since it has few false friends with Latin languages. I often thought search engines written by English speakers focused on bags of words can't work very well in Turkish though?
All languages with synthetic morphology (both agglutinative languages, which glue chains of morphemes together, and fusional languages, which inflect morphemes) struggle with the language modelling techniques used for English.
A big issue is that in synthetic languages 'words' are much more 'rare' (because there are more morpheme combinations per word). So if you're building something like a bag-of-words or an ngram model, your input data is likely to be very sparse which translates to poor modelling of the language itself/what words speakers would judge as grammatical.
With agglutinative languages like Turkish, a technique that has been used with considerable success is just considering each morpheme a distinct token, but it has many of the same problems as word-level tokenization. I was looking at a paper recently that claimed to have found a good way to do smoothing so that unseen ngrams could be assigned a non-zero probability in a way that conformed to the rules of the language, but we'll have to see if that can work in practice.
Re: Agglutinative Language
#10Can someone here explain this in an easier to understand way? This was a bit too dense for my understanding...
Agglutinative just means you glue (the -glu- refers to this) pieces (suffixes) at the end of words to express lots of things. This exists in English as well, but in restricted forms. For example blue+ish, quick+ly, blue+ness, look+ed. In an agglutinative language, this is how most of the things are expressed.
For example a totally normal Hungarian word is: szolgáltatásaiért = szolgá+l+tat+ás+a+i+ért = for his/her/its services. Szolga means servant, from Slavic origin. Szolgál is a verb meaning to serve. Szolgáltat means to provide service. Szolgáltatás means service (as in "goods and services", "internet service", etc.). Szolgáltatása means his/her/its service. Szolgáltatásai means his/her/its services. Szolgáltatásaiért means "for his/her/its services".