unicode-org / inflection

code, data and documentation related to handling inflection problems
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Add support for sorting adjectives #14

Open grhoten opened 4 months ago

grhoten commented 4 months ago

This is mostly an English topic, but it can be helpful in other languages. A more detailed discussion of the issue can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order

When adding a list of adjectives to a noun, there is typically an order to the adjectives. When they're in the wrong order, the message can be awkward.

For example, in English, you would want to be able to say "old French animated movies" instead of "animated French old movies". There's a lot of other examples, but the point is that there is an implicit order in English. Adding metadata that is similar to what is listed in the Wikipedia article would be sufficient.

nciric commented 3 months ago

So this is a question of providing lexicon info with the adjective?

Is the expectation for our logic to sort adjectives given the lexicon info? I don't see a strong use case for that in the current localization:

  1. Messages are usually created in English, and adjective order is already correct
  2. Translators can fix the order as needed.

Do you envision a case where we drop a number of adjectives into a placeholder/sentence and expect algorithm to sort it?