Wikifunctions:Type proposals/French tenses
Why?
For the eventual plans to use Wikifunctions to power Abstract Wikipedia, having functions to conjugate French verbs (or groups of verbs, like regular -er verbs) are very important.
The conjugation for a verb depends on several factors, but one of them is the tense in which the sentence is written. The French language has 22 tenses.
Currently, I've implemented a conjugation function, Conjugate être (Z21599) (for être, the verb "to be", which has unique conjugation), which requires you to type the tense you want in as a string. It currently only supports 3 tenses (type "past" for Passé composé, type "present" for Présent and type "future" for Futur simple). [UPDATE: I've now migrated it to take natural numbers in the format described here, but an actual dropdown type would be better].
It would be great to just have an enum-like type for use in the conjugation functions, which provides a dropdown list of all the French tenses for you to select from when using the function.
Structure
An enum, with 22 different values. The key used are natural numbers.
Values
- Présent
- Passé composé
- Imparfait
- Plus-que-parfait
- Futur simple
- Futur antérieur
- Passé simple
- Passé antérieur
- Présent du subjonctif
- Passé du subjonctif
- Imparfait du subjonctif
- Plus-que-parfait du subjonctif
- Présent du conditionnel
- Passé du conditionnel
- Présent de l'impératif
- Passé de l'impératif
- Présent de l'infinitif
- Passé de l'infinitif
- Présent du participe
- Passé du participe
- Présent du gérondif
- Passé du gérondif
Example values
{
"type": "French tense",
"value": "Futur simple"
}
|
{
"Z1K1": "Znnnnn",
"ZnnnnnK1": "Zmmmmm"
}
|
Validator
Ensures that the value is a valid French tense (a number from 1 to 22).
Identity
Tenses are equal if they have the same ZID.
Converting to code
In both Python and JS, it will be considered a number.
Renderer
Display the label associated with the tense. In all languages it should show the French name for the tense, as even in English or other languages we still call it be by the French name when learning/teaching French. It should not be marked for translation.
Discussion and !votes
Support, as proposer. MolecularPilot (talk) 01:02, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- I think we should aim to use grammatical features. See derived features example (Z22111), for example. (There has been some discussion about changing the collapsed view but for the time being, it’s worth fully expanding.) We should also consider phab:T379338, as @Feeglgeef suggests. Sorry, but I’m going to
Oppose for the time being. Thank you for stimulating our thinking… Please see Wikifunctions:Project chat#Natural language functions. GrounderUK (talk) 14:12, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
- I think we should aim to use grammatical features. See derived features example (Z22111), for example. (There has been some discussion about changing the collapsed view but for the time being, it’s worth fully expanding.) We should also consider phab:T379338, as @Feeglgeef suggests. Sorry, but I’m going to
Support a translation system and a drop-down list will allow these functions to be used by as many people as possible. Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick (talk) 09:06, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
Support I support the idea but I'm not sure about the modelling, shouldn't we split it in three for the Tense (the true tense), aspect and mood? Also, wouldn't it be better to have one list for all languages? (same comment as on Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/French_subjects). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 14:18, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
Oppose on preference to phab:T379338 Feeglgeef (talk) 20:35, 19 January 2025 (UTC)
- moral support I don't know enough about the language to give useful feedback. It would be good to see linguistic types for anything we can't foresee being able to do with Wikidata. (Are we sure we can't do this?) --99of9 (talk) 11:55, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
- Even if the phab task that @Feeglgeef and @GrounderUK mentioned does not get up, it seems like now we have a better picture of how grammatical feature types might work. At the very least it's important that the enum's somehow link to their respective Wikidata values. 99of9 (talk) 09:37, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
- @99of9: see fr:wikt:Conjugaison:français/dessiner for the French of the verb dessiner (to draw). Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick (talk) 09:45, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
- Even if the phab task that @Feeglgeef and @GrounderUK mentioned does not get up, it seems like now we have a better picture of how grammatical feature types might work. At the very least it's important that the enum's somehow link to their respective Wikidata values. 99of9 (talk) 09:37, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
- I am unsure about this. I like it in general, but I wonder, just as Vigneron above, about whether there is a natural simpler split-up of the tenses. Also I would prefer if we started with a simpler and smaller grammatical feature first, before creating such a big one. Once we learned from that, this looks like the way to go for me! --Denny (talk) 14:55, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
Oppose I would prefer a more general approach. We could start with a universal type for tenses (independant from languages) and find out if we really need specific types for every single language. --Ameisenigel (talk) 20:28, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
- Not every single language needs it's own type, but French does have tenses that most other languages do not (that's why it has sooooo many!), and using a cross-language "tense" type as an alternative to this in French conjugation functions would be unintuitive because many grammatically valid tenses would not be available for use in the function. I like this universal type suggestion (thank you!), but I think for tenses, unlike subjects (where there are only a finite possible number) that perhaps we need a global type and then language-specific types working together! :) MolecularPilot (talk) 05:25, 8 February 2025 (UTC)