Armenian - " ՞ " character in words?

Support & Feedback Forum
1

Hello,

I’m starting with Armenian, and have a question about one symbol (to my understanding, it’s a question mark).
When there’s " ՞ "character in the middle of some words, like “Ի՞նչ”, LingQ’s apparently having problem with this, splitting such words into two parts. I know I can create lingqs for phrases, but in theory, could this be fixed so the words like "Ի՞նչ could have their own lingqs like regular words?

5 Likes
2

Hello!

I did Armenian for a while too. In the end, I decided the only way was to highlight the main word, symbol and ending as a phrase and save it with a tag such as ‘‘question form’’.

In a sense this means that you will be duplicating known words in the LingQ word count system but this is the way Armenian orthography is and there seems no way round it.

The symbol seems to represent the rising tone of voice of a question which in spoken Armenian is very clearly pronounced. I think it’s use is quite logical although different most other languages.

3 Likes
3

Thanks. I’ll check with our team if there is anything we can do about it.

4 Likes
4

Hi Mr_Potato, thanks for chiming in!
Let’s see if this can be fixed, it would be more convenient to just consider words with the question mark as separate single words, would speed up things.

Duplicating known words are completely ok in my opinion, we always do it (more or less) while lingqing in every language (with verbs forms/tenses, declensions etc.).

3 Likes
5

Also, when creating a phrase lingq for a word with the question mark, the lingq is being created without the mark (and it produces wrong translation).

2 Likes
6

+1 Request for a fix for the Armenian mid-word punctuation issue. I think the question mark (՞, e.g., ի՞նչ), stress mark (՛, e.g., ապրե՛ս), and exclamation mark (՜, e.g., այո՜) would best be simply ignored by the token/word parser for the purpose of detecting lingqs.

3 Likes
7

Thanks, we will look into this.

2 Likes
8

HI, I noticed today that there’s been an attempt at a fix for this. Thanks! I don’t know if it’s considered done yet or not, but in case it was, I wanted to point out a few issues I’ve seen with the fix:

  1. When rendering to the reader, the new parser loses any spaces or punctuation that were preceding a lingq that contains one of the mid-word punctuation marks. This happens in any of the reader views (sentence, page, synchronized), but not in the lesson editor. Example:
    “—Ինչպե՞ս եք։ Ուտո՞ւմ եք։” renders as “Ինչպե՞ս եքՈւտո՞ւմ եք։” Note the missing em-dash at the beginning and the missing fullstop/space in the middle. (The linqs do remain separated, however, even though there’s no space between them, so they’re still usable, yay!)
  2. The punctuated lingqs get counted as different lingqs from the non-punctuated versions (i.e., ի՞նչ and ինչ end up two different lingqs). Since the meaning of the words don’t change with the punctuation, that’s not necessary nor desired.
  3. The TTS system still reads the words as though they are split (e.g., it reads դո՞ւք as դո ւք)
  4. In all of the mini-stories the new punctuated lingqs are not selectable (except 1c, which I know was recently edited, so that could be why they work there).

Thanks for taking a crack at a fix! Despite the issues above, I think it still better than it splitting the words into separate lingqs. The only one that’s really problematic is the first issue with losing the spaces between words. Things can get a little difficult to read without them :sweat_smile:

4 Likes
9

Hi, found an additional issue with the new punctuated lingqs today. It looks like they don’t actually get created in a way that lessons can match them up correctly on subsequent lesson loads. As an example: if I create a lingq for “ի՞նչ” in a lesson then I refresh the page (or load another lesson with the same word in it), the lingq for it will revert to blue. Then if I search for the lingq in my Vocabulary section, I’ll find instead a lingq for “ի նչ” (split and with no punctuation mark).

The expected behavior is that punctuated and non-punctuated versions of the same word would count as the same lingq. Making separate lingqs for each punctuated version is acceptable, but not optimal as you could end up with “ինչ”, “ի՞նչ”, “ի՛նչ”, and “ի՜նչ” as four separate lingqs for the same word (it would be like separate links for “what”, “what?”, “what”, and “what!” in English), which would falsely inflate a user’s lingq and known-word counts in Armenian since (as far as I know) every word in the language can be punctuated like this.

2 Likes
10

Hi, it’s been a few months, so I wanted to check in on the updates for this, especially the first issue listed above about the loss of space and punctuation before punctuated linqs. With the linqs now saving, it’s the biggest issue left of the list that significantly affects usability.

2 Likes
11

I’ll check with our team what is the status of this.

2 Likes