January 26, 2005

UNIVERSAL CONJUGATOR.

The Logos Universal Conjugator takes any verb you give it and conjugates it. Well, not any, of course, but a lot of common ones. I put in "go" and got a full conjugation in English; then I tried "anar" and got:

The infinitive of the verbal voice you chose is one of the following, please select the language you prefer.
* Catalan: anar
* Swedish: ana
So I clicked on the first and got a full conjugation in Catalan. And -- my goodness! -- I just discovered that if you click on one of the verbal forms, in this case anat, you get a selection of Catalan passages using it! Wonderful stuff, and I can't thank Songdog enough for alerting me to it.

Posted by languagehat at January 26, 2005 05:41 PM
Comments

I looked up the Standard English, but rarely-used, verb "eke". It was sort of unnerving to see that word used over and over again. I was hoping for subjunctive and imperative forms -- but no.

I was also wondering about the modal forms. "Bill, under the circumstances I think that she should eke out a meager existence gathering snails".

Or, "Could you please eke out your miserable livelihood somewhere else not so close to me?"

Posted by: John Emerson at January 26, 2005 06:12 PM

Whoa, Hat, check out the Mapunzugun paradigms! I had to poke around a lot to realize that this must be what Ethnologue calls Mapudungun, a language spoken in Chile and Argentina.

It would be nice if the site told you what the words meant.

Posted by: ACW at January 26, 2005 06:57 PM

Wow. That one got bookmarked.

Posted by: beth at January 26, 2005 08:02 PM

Yeah, I was surprised to see Mapuzugun there too. (I assume it's Mapudungun, likewise. I have a photocopy of a brief sketch of the language from Campbell's Concise Compendium of the World's Languages. I didn't bother with the first page, though, which had an introduction to the language and phonological details, and might have provided a clue as to why it's called Mapuzugun here. Apparently that wasn't what I was interested in when I made the copy. But the personal endings seem to more or less match up with what's described - it could be a different dialect, though.

The following examples of complex Mapudungu (as Campbell spells it) verbal morphology are given:


piñmalkan(root pin 'to say'): 'to denigrate someone who is, along with others, present, without confronting him/her directly';
inakonkəlen(root konkəlen 'to be inside something'):'to be in a region, house or family where one was not born; i.e. is a stranger'.

(If the root of second example should really be kon, it's conjugated here (konkülen is given as one of the forms).)

It's interesting that they've chosen to represent all these languages with flags. I've seen the Esperanto flag before, but this is the first time I've seen a flag used to represent Latin.

Incidentally, there's another conjugator, with a different selection of languages, here.

Posted by: Tim May at January 26, 2005 08:05 PM

I am denigrating and farting in the general direction of someone on this thread.

Oh, wait. A different thread on a different site. Sorry.

I wish I knew what "ñ" stood for. That would be a VERY useful blogging word.

Posted by: John Emerson at January 26, 2005 08:59 PM

Odd, when I tried "eke" it gave me the Turkish verb "ekmek."

Posted by: Mike at January 26, 2005 09:01 PM

Absolutely priceless! Thanks!

Posted by: céline at January 27, 2005 03:54 AM

Not as wonderful as you think; I've tried several Dutch verbs, and besides not knowing how to conjugate a number of normal regular verbs, The Universal Conjugator also make some hefty mistakes. For instance, the conditional perfect of 'to do', doen is 'zouden gedaan hebben', not, as the conjugator sais, 'zouden gedoen hebben'. Even a simple, regular verb as 'wachten', 'to wait' is conjugated incorrectly: 'jij/hij/zij/het wacht'(you/he/she/it waits) is shown as 'wachtt' -with double t. It should be a single t. The conditional perfect of 'wachten' is 'zouden gewacht hebben', not 'zouden gewachten hebben'.
You just cannot assume the Conjugator give the right answers.

Posted by: rob steenbergen at January 27, 2005 05:08 AM

Oh dear. Well, we'll hope they're still ironing out the kinks.

Posted by: language hat at January 27, 2005 09:08 AM
I wish I knew what "ñ" stood for.
You mean the character? It's just "ñ". You should be able to read the mojibake in my comment above if your browser lets you force it to display as UTF-8 - I had to do it that way to include a schwa.

The real trick to using the word in conversation would be conjugating it in three persons and three numbers for both subject and object.

Posted by: Tim May at January 27, 2005 10:44 AM

The site also seems to imply an editorial decision that any given verb is only inflected one way. There are many English verbs with both strong and weak conjugations, or variant forms. The editors seem to have picked one form and gone with it. This is true even for the standard past tenses of 'to hang': it is treated purely as a strong conjugation verb. Interesting site nonetheless.

Posted by: Richard Hershberger at January 27, 2005 12:06 PM

The site also seems to imply an editorial decision that any given verb is only inflected one way. There are many English verbs with both strong and weak conjugations, or variant forms. The editors seem to have picked one form and gone with it. This is true even for the standard past tenses of 'to hang': it is treated purely as a strong conjugation verb. Interesting site nonetheless.

Posted by: Richard Hershberger at January 27, 2005 12:06 PM

Piñmalkan it is. I plan to engage in this delightful activity constantly (except here) as soon as I have the conjugation mastered.

Posted by: John Emerson at January 27, 2005 12:26 PM

It has a few problems in Russian as well: there's no future in the imperfective for мочь [to be able to], yet the site lists one; also, it lists to perfective as помочь [to help] - though the perfective is usually formed with the по- prefix, the perfective of мочь is смочь.

Also, all the conjugations are broken links, for some reason in the Russian. I haven't checked the other languages.

On the other hand, I found a big collection of Russian jokes on the site, and then accidentally closed it, oops.

Posted by: PF at January 27, 2005 02:08 PM

Peffee, go to anekdot.ru, you'll find even bigger (and wiki-style daily additions)collection there.

Posted by: Tatyana at January 27, 2005 03:18 PM

This one was funny. I didn't know that the Russian verb "obvetshat'" and "vibrirovat'" can be used in passive voice :-)

Posted by: Temcat at January 27, 2005 04:53 PM

Interesting....Try putting "lay" into the conjugation machine (as in, "lay the book on the table") and it gets just as confused as we do.

Posted by: Patricia Koren at January 27, 2005 05:56 PM

In addition to conjugations the site has quite a large archive of texts in many languages. When you click on one of the conjugated forms to see context, you can then click on the green box next to the context to see the full work from which the context is excerpted. Or alternately, you can click on the "Authors" tab at the top of the window and enter the author's name whose work you are interested in, this may be a more efficient way of finding a particular text.

Posted by: Jeremy Osner at January 27, 2005 10:16 PM