Saturday, February 6, 2010

An idea on verb conjugations...

I have been toying with how to make this work for a couple of weeks. You are no doubt familiar with those wonderful Barron's 501 (Insert language name here) Verbs books which exist for just about every language except Tamil. There is no reason why I shouldn't be able to slowly create the exact same thing.

The advantage of something like this, is if you just can't remember for example the infinitive for a verb, maybe it is irregular, maybe it is too late at night, rather than spend time looking up the rules, you just look it up in the list.

There are a few roadblocks to making it perfect the first time through.

Formatting issues.
I will most likely have a single page with all the verbs listed with links to their conjugations.
I have seen people who have two blogs, one for meta links, the other for the content so that the main meta links don't get buried.  I could also just make each verb a google document and link to that as well. Google docs are more easily download-able and editable, although blogger has inbuilt indic transliteration, and google docs don't... which both being google, I can't explain.

Word order:
Would I sort verbs by class, and alphabetically within class? Would I sort them all alphabetically? By Tamil, by English? My 501 Spanish Verbs book is alpha by Spanish, but verb classes in Tamil are pretty important. But then, what of a word that can be two different classes based on whether it is being used transitively or intransitively? Does it go under both classes then, since the conjugations would be different? Or on the same page with notes specifying the unusual nature of it...

At this point, I would only be able to work with past, present, future, infinitive. That is still enough work though that I want to keep it organized in a way that I will not want to keep changing!

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