Michiel de Mare

I’ve just fixed Bug 34. The most recent bug in my bug-tracking system is No. 2654, so I’ve been taking my time. It was a tricky bug, but having solved it at last feels very rewarding.

It was also an interesting bug, and had to do with some peculiarities of English grammar. Usually, you can easily turn a sentence that’s in the present into the past or the perfect tense. “I see”, “I saw”, “I’ve seen”. But in English, there are some exceptions, and they’ve got to do with modal verbs, like “must”, “can”, and “may”.

He says that I may swim.

*He said that I might swim.

*He says that I have might swim.

“May” at least has a past tense, but you can’t use it, because there’s a shift in meaning between “may” and “might”. And neither “may”, nor “can”, nor “must” has a perfect tense. So what do you do? You transform the sentence by using another construction.

He says that I have been allowed to swim.

And that’s exactly what Bug 34 was all about. It now works correctly, and the title of this post can now be translated into all other languages.

Words seem central to Inglua. But what the site really revolves around is something different: Meanings. That may sound like a fairly meaningless distinction, and most of the time it is. Words like ‘apple’ or ‘heart’ have simple, clear meanings. They correspond precisely with words in other languages.

But sometimes there’s a huge discrepancy between words and meanings. Recently I’ve finally brought myself to clean up the spaghetti of meanings that I had filed under the name “fuerza”. It concerns a cluster of fourteen different meanings that are translated with “power” in English or “fuerza” in Spanish. In English, these meanings are usually translated with “force”, “strength” or “power”. You can even use them in a single sentence:

“Projecting Air Power is the Air Force’s biggest strength.”

In this case, it seems that every meaning is translated by a unique combination of words. For instance, while “fuerza” in Spanish is usually translated by “Kraft” in German, there is one case where the correct translation is “Stärke”. And while the most frequent translations are “power” (English), “fuerza” (Spanish), “kracht” (Dutch), “Kraft” (German) and “force” (French), there is no single meaning tht combines these five words.

This makes it hard to lump meanings together, since a meaning is defined by having a unique combination of translations. Let me give an example.

If I were to add a new language Fringlish, and Fringlish had two words for “apple”: “grapple” for green apples, and “rapple” for red apples.

Now I’d need to split the meaning “apple” in two. Otherwise I couldn’t teach you, suppose you were learning Fringlish, when to use “rapple”, and when to use “grapple”. And languages without such a distinction (such as English) would need examples to tell these meanings apart. E.g. “APPLE: Bob stole a shiny green apple from his neighbor Ina.”

So if you’re French and you’re learning German, we cannot ask you to translate “puissance” in German. We’d have to add: “PUISSANCE: La Brittannie était une puissance maritime.” Or: “PUISSANCE: L’unité de puissance est le watt.” And only then could you decide between “Macht” and “Leistung”.

This is the reason that Inglua doesn’t use one of the many word lists floating around on the internet. They’re based on words, not on meanings. And that makes all the difference.

Apart from training your vocabulary, at times Inglua also throws short sentences your way. No Joycean prose, alas, or anything that could plausibly appear in a poem.

Just sentences like “I wash the cat”or “All spiders like some fat flies.”.

Or like “You blush.”. And that brings us to today’s problem.

You see, although (dost thou remember?) English used to make a distinction between formal and informal modes of addressing people, the “thou” form was already disappearing during Shakespeare’s time, and is now completely gone, except in some British dialects.

And there’s no distinction between the singular and the plural in the second person either. The rule is simple: The second person is always “you”.

However, it’s more complicated in other languages. In French, it’s always “vous”, with one exception: the singular informal, which is “tu”.

German and Dutch also distinguish between informal plural (you guys, y’all) and the formal forms. German uses “ihr” and “Sie”, while Dutch uses “jullie” and “u”.

Spanish has the most forms: tú, usted, vosotros (and vosotras for feminine subjects!). But in Spanish they’re usually optional.

So if we ask you to translate “you blush”, you’ll have a problem, regardless of which language you’re learning.

For French, should you translate this with “tu rougis” or “vous rougissez”? And for Spanish, you’d have as much as five options.

We could solve this by adding some context (”Sir, you blush!”) but that would look fairly unnatural. So we’ve decided to annotate the questions. We’ll ask “You(formal) blush”, and you’ll have enough information to decide between “tu” and “vous” (but not between “usted” and “ustedes”).

But we only supply these annotations when they’re needed, since, frankly, they’re ugly. That means that French people learning English will never see “Vous(informal) rougissez”.

Why not? “It’s always you.”

Recently I have extended the kinds of sentences that Inglua can handle. Inglua now supports (and generates) modal verbs.

Modal verbs cannot stand by themselves. Instead they change the meaning of the verb. For instance, “I swim.” is pretty straightforward. “I can swim.” is a typical example of a modal verb. So is “I want to swim.”

Of course, these sentences may also appear in the perfect tense, or in a question: “I have not wanted to swim.”, and “Do I want to swim?”.

In English, the hard bits are determining whether to use ‘to’, and dealing with the surprising appearance of the word ‘do’ in questions and negations. Also difficult is that “I cannot swim.” in the perfect tense turns into “I have not been able to swim.”

German is hard because it tends to reverse the order of the predicate: “Ich habe den Hund nicht fallen lassen wollen.”

And both German and Dutch turn the perfect tense into an infinitive if it’s not the ‘ultimate’ verb. “Ik heb de kat niet gezien.” vs. “Ik heb de kat niet willen zien.” French, on the other hand, leaves the perfect in: “Je n’ai pas voulu voir le chat.”