Skip to main content

Searching For the Conjugation

stems = {
"o" : "first person singular",
"as" : "second person singular",
"at" : "third person singular",
"amus" : "first person plural",
"atis" : "second person plural",
"ant" : "third person plural",
} 
conjugations = list()
for key in stems:
    conjugations.append(key)
def parse(verb):
    for conj in conjugations:
        if verb.count(conj) == 1:
            return(stems[conj])
        else:
            continue 
while True:
    entry = input("Enter a Latin verb: ")
    if parse(entry) != None:
        print(parse(entry))
    else:
        print("Verb form not found.")
One major problem with the last iteration of the conjugation finder: I entered the plural forms as singular in the dictionary!

I believe the search tool will be more effective if it isn't tied to any particular root.  Then I can have a dictionary filled with different stems.  Ideally, if the application finds any of these stems at the end of the word, it will then return the appropriate information to the user. 

So my new idea is to keep my dictionary of all the relevant stems, then loop through a list of the dictionary's keys to see whether any of them are present in the user entry.  If the app finds one of the keys in the user entry, it returns the dictionary entry for that key. 

I experimented around with using find(), rfind(), index(), etc., but I couldn't get it to work.  Originally, I wanted to recreate the stem using a key-search, but I couldn't pull out the right part of the string.  That's a problem in itself.  Say you have the string "amant" -- you use find() to get the position of "ant", then create a new string, "ant," by slicing the old string with the position.  So I thought I could do something like this:
stem = verb[verb.find("ant"):]
But it just didn't work.

Another thing to note: the parser isn't intelligent.  So I want to get to a version where it won't be fooled if someone enters a verb with repeated stems or multiple stems.  If the user enter "amoasat," which isn't a real verb, I don't expect the parser to tell the user it isn't a real verb (that would be far down the line) -- but I do expect it to tell the user that it's third-person singular and not second-person singular.  Not sure I have that functionality yet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Geodata From Google's API

The apps I'm going to be analyzing are part of Dr. Charles Severance's MOOC on Python and Databases and work together according to the following structure (which applies both in this specific case and more generally to any application that creates and interprets a database using online data). The data source, in this case, is Google's Google Maps Geocoding API.  The "package" has two components: geoload.py  and geodump.py .  geoload.py  reads a list of locations from a file -- addresses for which we would like geographical information -- requests information about them from Google, and stores the information on a database ( geodata.db ).  geodump.py  reads and parses data from the database in JSON, then loads that into a javascript file.  The javascript is then used to create a web page on which the data is visualized as a series of points on the world-map.  Dr. Severance's course focuses on Python, so I'm only going to work my way through ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shell Sort

Today I spent a little bit of time researching the "Shell" sort.  I wanted to post a few notes about the Princeton Algorithms Course's implementation to help me solidify my understanding. First, a little tidbit.  When I first heard about this algorithm, I thought it had something to do with shell games.  Turns out a man named Donald Shell discovered this method of sorting, whence the name. The Algorithms  book gives the following explanation (Sedgewick and Wayne,  Algorithms, 4th ed., p. 258): The idea is to rearrange the array to give it the property that taking every hth entry (starting anywhere) yields a sorted subsequence. Such an array is said to be h-sorted. Put another way, an h-sorted array is h independent sorted subsequences, interleaved together. By h-sorting for some large values of h, we can move items in the array long distances and thus make it easier to h-sort for smaller values of h. Using such a procedure for any sequence of values o...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's a Date

I guess I should really be putting these things up in GitHub.  The way I see it, the coding journal is just a place to share the code I write or study along with any notes I have about it.  It's sort of a documentation LiveJournal, if you will. Anyway, this is a "study" for my project idea: create an app that will prompt the user for two dates, then calculate the difference between them. The burden of this study is twofold: (1) convert dates in standard American form (e.g. December 15, 1993) into dates in standard American numeric form (e.g. 12/15/1993); (2) create a numerical representation of the date. To process the date, I started with a list of the months.  I then used a loop to create a dictionary that would attach a value to each month. Next I had to parse the user entry (I haven't added any debugging for incorrect entries yet). I did so by splitting the entry into "raw" data.  I used my dictionary to process the month name into a number, str...
Post a Comment
Read more