Hi, I’ve just found that greek words written in polytonic accent system count as different words than the same words written according to the modern one. This is falsely doubling the amount of known words, are there some plans to fix this issue? And, for example, do not count accents in Greek as a factor in deciding whether the word is a new one or not? It would cause some difficulties (there are words which differ only in accent, but I see much more benefits than drawbacks).
Cheers.
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We are familiar with that problem and we are looking to find a way to deal with it. Hopefully we will have it figured out soon.
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There are tools on the Internet that allow instant change of the accentuation system - maybe application of something like this to allow automatic transcription while importing content? Just thinking out loud, for the moment I am coping to such a program myself (as polytonic words tend to be hardly understood by LinQ’s dictionaries) and then to LinQ, but it is somehow time-consuming. Cheers.
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I’ve run into the same issue with Persian, where words with vowel markings (optional and usually omitted) are counted separately. Presumably, this applies to Arabic and Hebrew, as well. I have resorted to “ignoring” (trashing) the words when I already know them, so as not to bloat my known words.
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I think this is happening in Armenian too when the question mark (◌՞ ) is placed over a word.
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I’d like to see ancient Greek separated into a different language. Half the books there are not relevant to me.
There are relatively few books in Greek (modern). I have bought and imported some. How can more books become available to everyone?
Polytonic orthography (from Ancient Greek πολύς (polýs) ‘much, many’, and τόνος (tónos) ‘accent’) is the standard system for Ancient Greek and Medieval Greek .
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The consideration of accents in Greek as a factor in deciding whether a word is counted as different or not is an interesting suggestion. It’s worth noting that the treatment of accents in languages can be quite complex, and there may be situations where accent marks change the meaning of a word or its grammatical function.
However, if the main concern is to avoid counting words as different simply based on accent marks, one possible approach could be to develop post-processing tools or scripts that normalize the text by removing accent marks before analysis. This would allow you to treat words with different accents as the same word for specific applications.
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Yeah, sure - I know that polytonic ortography is the standard for Ancient and Medieval Greek, but I am not talking about them here (I could hardly see them suitable for LinQ anyways), but Modern Greek, which up to the seventies of the last century at least were written in the polytonic. The text I imported for myself fortunately could have been found with a better, monotonic variant on a blog, whence I copied it to LinQ and it works just fine (https://logotechnikoistologio.wordpress.com/, very good source for the older/classic Modern Greek literature).
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Please separate old Greek from modern Greek. Having books in a separate line might be the simplest. Or a separate language.
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Similar issue in Armenian, but worse: in Armenian those marks are actually punctuation marks (equivalent to ? and !) that appear mid-word instead of the end of sentences. The difference in problems is that, instead of making a second lingq for the same word like discussed above with Greek and others languages with accents on this thread, LingQ breaks words with such marks into two lingqs (e.g., «շնորհաքալո՞ւն» turns into the linqs «շմորհակալո՞» and «ւն»), making them often unusable, since they are now broken words. It would be like trying to figure out how to manage lingqs for the word “again” if it was broken into “agai” and “n” every time it appeared in a question. It’s hard to just ignore them as well, since the broken pieces of words could be words themselves that I don’t know (think how “pension” broken into “pens” and “ion” makes two words that have nothing to do with the original word).
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Yes on ignoring the accent marks. The Greek words for bank and table are identical except for the accent mark, but so are lead and lead in English, and they also mean totally different things. No one gets upset that a metal and a verb don’t get differentiated in English, and the same could be true for Greek.
It is also kind of weird to have Ancient Greek stuff alongside Modern Greek as if they are the same…
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