At 15:30 2002-09-05 +0200, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
[...] The goal is to be able to have correct output for such
phrases: "voulez-vous créer un nouveau X", where X is a noun of unknown
gender and first letter. [...]
I want to give this some very careful thought, as it involves a part of
language that's very important, but where it's notoriously hard to find
patterns that are intuitive AND applicable across languages AND don't
overcomplicate the the simple common cases for the sake of handling rarer
messier cases.
I'm very slow in managing to think about these things, because I'm too used
to the methodologies in formalist (as opposed to functionalist)
linguistics, where everyone wants every theory to work for every part of
every language -- but clearly what's called for with the Maketext approach
is a good mix of intuitive interfaces/notations and of "80/20"
solutions. (And that's to say nothing of the modern formalist fear of
notations that are "too powerful"!)
Just now, I'm terribly busy with a grand rewrite of the basic Pod
parser/formatter classes, but I'm hoping that in a week or two I'll have
something clever to say about your suggestions.
--
Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
