Reporting lesson errors
Language: Greek
Lesson: 1b - Ο Μιχάλης σηκώνεται στις έξι κάθε πρωί, μέρος 2
Greek sentence with an error: Πηγαίνω στην δουλειά με το αυτοκίνητο μου.
Corrected sentence: Πηγαίνω στη δουλειά με το αυτοκίνητό μου.
Explanation:
The double accent issue is tricky, because lingq does not do any accent trimming before querying a dictionary.
Maybe you are lucky enough and it already has a definition that works, but if you have to resort to a dictionary, it’s more likely to find the word with only one accent. Also, they are considered two different words, so you have to bookkeep those two versions too.
I just tested and wiktionary gives you a result for αυτοκίνητο but not for αυτοκίνητό.
So by fixing the text you are somehow making the reading experience worse! Of course Lingq is to blame here, but in all honestly removing that last accent is hard.
It is so hard that I made a program + (an ugly) chrome extension to automatically detect and fix them 
And after clicking the fix button…
MDA refers to missing double accent and RFN to remove final n.
Thank you, we will check this.
By that reasoning, in the English language, horse’s is a different word than horse? Or in the German language Marys is a different word than Mary?
Why would a dictionary or Wiktionary have the possessive form of a word as a seperate entry? Not to say it can’t, but I can’t see horse and *horse’*s as seperate entries…
Wouldn’t it, from a programming perspective, be easier to program and/or document the need for a second accent mark for proparoxytones followed by possessive pronouns?
This type of accenting for possessives is one of the more simple examples in Greek, what about these situations? Separate entries in a dictionary for each seems like it would get unnecessarily complicated really quickly.
ο γιατρός μού είπε
ο γιατρός μου είπε
ο γιατρός μου μου είπε
Ο ΓΙΑΤΡΟΣ ΜΟΥ ΕΙΠΕ (where there are no accents)…
I’m not sure what you mean.
Wiktionary or any dictionary for that matter, can not just simply add a redirecting lemma for every proparoxytone because addressing if a word is proparoxytone is the hard problem in Greek, due to synizesis and other merges.
Should they add δωμάτιό, σχέδιό, μάτιά, χέριά? The last two are wrong.
This type of accenting for possessives is one of the more simple examples in Greek,
Believe me I know. I’ve spent more time than I’m willing to admit to make the above program work to a point where some folks are actually using it to fix Wiki pages.
But all of this is tangential, if you want to fix it go for it, I think it’s a good change overall. I was just highlighting that while the final ν is a harmless fix, the double accent one has some unfortunate consequences.
If the LingQ team wanted to address it (which is in my opinion a better solution than whatever discussion we can have about dictionaries), they would store αυτοκίνητό internally as αυτοκίνητο, with the two accented word visible to the user, and the stripped one for their database and dictionary querying. – I can tell you they won’t do it, even if removing the second accent is way easier than adding the second accent when needed.
Not sure it’s relevant, but I didn’t think that ια created seperate syllables…like άι, ιά… it’s one sound.
Perhaps an exception would be the two different words both spelled βιάζομαι, as one has four syllables, pronounced as βι-ά-ζο-με, while the other has only 3 syllables, pronounced βιά-ζο-με… (it’s pretty important not to screw that up…given their definitions)
I digress.
And it can happen at every position, and in other diphthongs (including αϊ) etc.
