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Armchair field linguistics experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5735 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes  Studies: French | Message 1 of 14 24 March 2009 at 6:09am | IP Logged | ||
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If you happen to already know Turkish, please feel free to visit but kindly refrain from posting anything substantive about the Turkish language, no matter how helpful you feel it may be or how incorrect the translations may be or how clearly off-track you see me going. Not even a confirmation that something is being puzzled out correctly or incorrectly.
This will make sense in the context of the following posts, but in advance, many thanks. Spanky Edited by Spanky on 24 March 2009 at 6:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5735 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 2 of 14 24 March 2009 at 6:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Just for fun and just because I like trying to solve puzzles, I am starting an experiment to see if I can figure out the morphology and syntactic features of a language totally foreign to me simply by submitting words and phrases for translation to one of the several computer translation sites identified in a recent post by Volte machine translation, and reviewing the responses. I am basing this experiment in part on an interesting recent post of Unzum relating to whether one could learn the features of a language by studying only phrases from a phrase book Unzum post
On the basis of this site's descriptions of various languages under Choosing a Language, I have picked Turkish, in part because it is completely foreign to me (apart from what I have just read on this site) and in part because it is described as an agglutinative language, and I have not encountered one of those yet apart from some very limited toying around with Inuktitut previously. Also, I wanted to stick with something using roman characters, and Turkish in any event is on the list of languages that I would like to learn someday, though it is way way down the list. Proposed approach: I will submit five (and only five) words or phrases every once in a while for translation. I may do this concurrently to several translation sites, just to test out whether there is any material variation in the provided translation. I am proposing to only spend a few minutes per day or per every couple of days on this, just to have something of an ongoing nature to work at and to not distract me from the other language learning that I should be focussing on instead. Just looking for something regular to look forward to each day or each couple of days, in the same way that some look forward to the morning's crossword puzzle. I am posting this in the General category rather than the Specific Language category because even though Turkish happens to be the subject matter of the investigation, this may be less about learning the characteristics of a single language and more about language learning in general. Play along if you like by either suggesting conclusions about the language structure from the translations or by suggesting the next words or phrases to put to the translator, though I would prefer to hold the pen on this project by doing the choosing and posting the translations myself. The idea is that we assume the role of a language explorer encountering a completely new language, with the only resource available to us being a single native speaker who is restricted to only translating whatever we put to him or her, and who may or may not be entirely reliable (taking into account the glitches that I understand sometimes still occur with machine translation). At five submisisons per every second day, we can run through approximately 900 translated words, phrases or sentences in a year, and that should be plenty to figure out the basic features of the written language and perhaps flesh out some of the basic vocubulary as well. Any one interested? Let me know (post or PM) or otherwise just play or follow along from time to time as you may like. Edited by Spanky on 24 March 2009 at 6:51am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5735 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 3 of 14 24 March 2009 at 6:35am | IP Logged | ||
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First set:
I have a blue book and two red books She has two blue books and one small red book They have many blue or red books Does he have a small blue book Do you have the big blue book. I am choosing to put forward complete sentences instead of just words to maximize at this point the information obtained. I am hoping these requests will provide some information regarding: - the pronouns (assuming Turkish uses pronouns, and that these are differentiated) for I, you, he, she, they - a noun to work with, including its plural form (assuming Turkish morphology changes nouns to reflect pluralization) - some adjectives, and an opportunity to see how they are used with a particular noun (and whether the adjectives change to reflect the pluralization of the subject noun) - a couple of conjunctions - examples of declarative v. interrogative sentence structure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5735 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 4 of 14 24 March 2009 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Submission #1
1. I have a blue book and two red books Ben mavi bir kitap ve iki kırmızı kitap var 2. She has two blue books or one small red book O iki mavi kitap veya bir küçük kırmızı kitap var 3. They have many blue or red books Onlar birçok mavi veya kırmızı kitap 4. Does he have a small blue book O küçük bir mavi kitap var mı 5. Do you have the big blue book Size büyük mavi kitap var mı Bon appétit - Jon Stewart's Daily Show is about to start, so I am outta here. Spanky Edited by Spanky on 24 March 2009 at 6:58am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6482 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 14 24 March 2009 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Good idea, but I think you should start with even simpler phrases - and more than 5 in each test. In the following lines I have pasted the original, the translation from Google and the one from Babylon. And if I was sceptical about those translation programs before I'm even more sceptical now. I don't know Turkish so I don't know when that "ben"-thing should be used, - but these two translators have clearly different ideas about that. And Google really likes the "var"-thing:
I have a book ==== Ben bir kitap var ==== Bir kitap I have two books ==== Ben iki kitabı var ==== Iki kitaplar I have a blue book ==== Ben mavi bir kitap var ==== BEN mavi bir kitap I have two blue books ==== İki mavi kitaplar var ==== Iki mavi kitaplar I have a red book ==== Ben kırmızı bir kitap var ==== BEN bir kırmızı kitap I don't have a book ==== Ben bir kitap yok ==== Yok kitap I don't have a blue book ==== Ben mavi bir kitap yok ==== Yok mavi bir kitap I don't have books ==== Ben kitap yok ==== Yok I don't have two books ==== İki kitap yok ==== Yok iki kitap I don't have two blue books ==== İki mavi kitap yok ==== Yok iki mavi kitaplar I have the book ==== Ben kitabı ==== BEN kitap I have the two books ==== Ben iki kitabı var ==== 'Iki kitap I have the two blue books ==== Ben iki mavi kitap var ==== 'Iki mavi kitaplar I own a book ==== Ben bir kitap kendi ==== BEN kendi kitap I buy a book ==== Ben bir kitap satın ==== BEN bir kitap 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5626 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 14 24 March 2009 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||
EN: The first Google machine translation is not perfect, but it is of better quality than the second Babylon machine translation, but this may be clear as well for someone, who doesn't know any Turkish at all, I suppose. Fasulye-Babylonia Edited by Fasulye on 24 March 2009 at 11:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6218 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 14 24 March 2009 at 11:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is equivalent to inferring the rules of English using the phrasebook "English as she is spoke".
It's one thing to puzzle things out from correct input. Puzzling them out from wrong input? Ouch. Using machine translation is in no way equivalent to using a (decent) phrasebook - the number of errors and quality of translation is enough to get the gist if you translate into a language you know, but it simply isn't correct enough to be a good base to work from in a target language. If I were going to use machine translation to learn a language, I would make sure I was translating -from- that language, not into it. If I were going to learn from a phrasebook (and actually, I have done this to some extent - it's moderately effective), I'd used a phrasebook. Given the state of modern automated translation, I would NOT mix the two. For what it's worth: you'll be able to figure out quite a lot of words with your current experiment, but your view of syntax will end up very distorted. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5626 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 14 24 March 2009 at 11:27am | IP Logged | ||
I fully agree with you, Volte. If someone aims to learn from such a Turkish machine translation this person will learn all the errors as well and there are enough, especially grammatical ones. Fasulye-Babylonia 1 person has voted this message useful |
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