Affixes are of two main types: prefixes or
suffixes. Affixes are usually short, and they have
meaning.
Prefixes occur at or near the start of a word; suffixes
at or near the end of a word.
Use the dialog to Add,
Update (edit), Insert, or Delete
(remove), affix pairs - either within the prefixes list, or within
the suffixes list.
Choose which list to work with by clicking Prefixes List,
or Suffixes List.
(If the source and target
languages do not use prefixes, just leave the Prefixes List empty.)
Each list that has contents will display two columns
of affixes. Each line contains an affix pair.
For
each affix pair: the first affix is from the source language, and the
second is the affix which has the same meaning in
the target language.
If the source language has a certain affix,
but the target language lacks it, enter the source language's affix,
but leave the target language's text box empty.
If the target
language has a certain affix, but the source language lacks it, do
not bother trying to enter the target language affix into the list,
because that line of the table would be ignored.
Type the affixes (that is, suffixes or prefixes depending on which
list you are working in) into the two text boxes at the right of the
dialog. (Do not type hyphens.) The left hand box is for a source
language affix. The right hand box is where you type the equivalent
affix from the target language.
If you select a line in the list,
that line's contents will appear in the text boxes and you can then
edit either affix, or both.
Buttons below the text boxes allow you to control what is done.
You can:
Add a new affix pair at the end of the
list.
Insert the affix pair which is in the text
boxes into the list; it will be put immediately preceding the
currently selected line.
Delete an affix pair.
Or,
Update a pair, meaning that your editing
changes done in the two text boxes will get moved into the selected
line in the list.
The lists are not ordered, so you can keep similar kinds of
affixes grouped together in your chosen part of the table.
The
more valid affix pairings you supply, the more accurate the Guesser
will be when it suggests a translation for you.
Helpful Hints
1. The Guesser does not really understand what affixes are. It
just matches recurring groups of letters. So the groups of letters
you include in the lists can contain more letters than what actually
occur in affixes. It might help if some of the affixes you type
include the adjacent letter from the word's root or stem. Also,
affixes which are only a single character are 'risky',
use them with care. See the Important Guidelines
section below.
2. When the Guesser is matching source text to
target text affix guesses, if there are longer and shorter matchups
possible, it will prefer the longer one over the shorter one. Combing
this fact with 1. above, it is possible to enter pairs that handle
spelling changes at affix boundaries (linguists call this language
behavior "morphophonemic changes")
3. Enter into the
list only affix spellings that actually occur.
4. If the spelling
of an affix changes depending on what follows it, enter some or all
of the possible combinations as a series of pairs.
5. Sometimes,
when two (or more) affixes occur together, as a combination they have
a spelling which is unexpected, or "irregular". In this
circumstance, type into the Guesser list each such pair of irregular
spellings - the irregular affix combination from the source langauge
followed by the matching affix combination from the target language
(whether irregular or not).
6. Do not expect the Guesser to do
miracles. Even though you supply lots of unique pairs, there will
always be circumstances which do not result in an accurate guess.
These you will need to correct manually in the phrasebox when you do
your adapting work, or press the Esc key to make the copied source
text be placed in the phrasebox instead of the unwanted guess.
Important Guidelines
1. The advice in this section will help you get good help from the guesser. And remember: if the Guesser is not doing enough of what you want, or it gives you anxiety, you can go to the Change Guesser Settings dialog and click the checkbox within that dialog to cause the Guesser to be turned off; or you can drag the slider to 0 percent - which has the same effect.
2. Avoid, at all costs, typing the same form in both the prefix list, and the suffix list. (Put it in just one list, and handle the other by manually typing in the phrasebox while you do the adapting work.)
3. Trying to make the Guesser handle lots of affixes may not work well. Too much potential for wrong guesses. Be selective - handle the most common affixes. If, for example, verbs have rich affixation, and nouns just a little bit of affixation, you may get better results by entering morphemes just for the verbs. But affixes for both word classes would be acceptable if unique, and if they are not short ones.
4. The Guesser cannot reliably determine the difference between stem and affix, so typing in lots of affixes will also give you lots of wrong guesses, with parts of the stem being changed too. Reject a bad guess by pressing the Esc key.
5. Avoid typing in single-letter affixes as much as possible. They tend to produce unexpected changes in the wrong places. Typing in some may be acceptable however - but only one or two for each list, and make sure you obey rule 2 above. Be aware that single-letter affixes in the lists will increase the frequency of bad guesses more than any other single factor.
6. Affixes which are longer produce fewer bad guesses. Two or more letters in an affix make it a much better candidate for successful guessing. The longer the affixes, the better will be the guesses.
7. Do not give up too early. When starting you will use the Esc key often, to reject a bad guess. But over time as the commonly occuring grammatical words get successfully adapted, the incidence of bad guesses will slowly decrease, and the proportion of accurate or helpful guesses will slowly increase.