User talk:Zocky

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—Ruakh_TALK 01:11, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian verbal inflection

Hi Zocky!

I very much like your initiative. However, I think that my answer to you will be a bit disappointing.

Generally I approve that we use inflection templates for SC nouns/verbs/adjectives, but I strongly insist that these should be kept only as a form of shorthand notation, i.e. for those that are unwilling to waste time manually typing the full inflection. E.g., you use it, and then I come along and fill in the full paradigm by hand :)

Entering full inflection manually is not that time-consuming: to me personally it takes 5-10 seconds for a noun, or 20-30 seconds for a verb (with the help of stem copy/pasting). And it can even be almost completely automated - one can trivially write a tool to extract full inflection of every SC lexeme from HJP and HML websites and turn it to our {sh-decl-noun} and {sh-conj} format (actually I wrote one tool that do exactly that when I first came to Wiktionary, but I figured out that it's even faster to do it manually :) Also, these have errors in some 2-3% of cases and they should be additionally manually checked.)

Additional problem are the accents: they often alternate in the inflection (of nouns and verbs), and even when they do not often the infinitive and present stem are differently accented (e.g. govòriti, but gòvorīm, gòvorīš....). So by providing full manual inflection we're making it possible for someone later to come along and fill in the accent marks.

One additional advantage of manual inflection is the search: if you provide the full inflection manually, inflected forms can be manually searched via Wiktionary searchbox. If they're generated by a template they cannot. Just yesterday Bogorm asked me what is the infinitive form of zebe. If he searched it, he could've found it, only because it was entered manually (if it was generated as {present_stem}e it wouldn't turn up in search results).

Another point (which is not that important): manual inflection is much easier to copy to other Wiktionaries. I have all the SC entries on my watchlist, and notice when they're regularly cloned elsewhere. E.g. ja:ići, ko:sestra. If we used some 200-300 inflection templates handling all the special cases, this would be much harder to do.

The only thing were templates make a lot of sense IMHO are the adjectives, whose inflection is pretty much regular and there is lots of redundancy. I haven't created any adjectival inflection templates so far though, but you are free to do it if you want to! --Ivan Štambuk 10:03, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Of course, none of this is set to stone. Note that one day we could turn all the fully inflected forms to templates (and vice versa) by a bot (it would only need to match the paradigm to a template, which shouldn't be too hard). Perhaps one day when we had an extensive coverage of SC verbs, some 20-30k lemmata, also accented, and when they finally fix the brain-damaged MediaWiki search (so that it searches also the template _output_), we might as well do exactly that! --Ivan Štambuk 10:11, 23 August 2009 (UTC)