Yes, you are right that the "American simple past" is quite overabundant, but that is because most of those sentences belong to the same contributor, whose way of speaking that is. Other examples include

“Mary said she doesn’t have very much money.” (#6417800)

My recommendation would be to guess the most obvious meaning (if it seems ambiguous) and translate it accordingly into correct indirect speech in your target language. For example, I would assume that “Tom said he didn’t have any idea why Mary did that” means “Tom said he didn’t have any idea why Mary had done that” and not “Tom said he didn’t have any idea why Mary was doing that” or “Tom said he didn’t have any idea why Mary did that occasionally”. Thus, I would translate it as „Tom sagte, er habe keine Ahnung, warum Maria das getan habe“ into German. Maybe I would ask for confirmation as to what he was really trying to express in that particular case before translating it. The answer is indeed usually, “It can be either.”

> I think there's an overabundance of the general use vernacular ''American past simple'' and a serious shortage of the past perfect (the present perfect as well but that's less problematic).

Do you mean that you're having trouble finding sentences in the past perfect, perhaps because you want to translate them? Or that you wish the distribution of sentences was different, maybe more diverse, or more reflective of the frequencies found in some external corpus (if so, where?)?

If you want to find sentences in the past perfect, you can do a search like this:

had << *bed|*ced|*ded|*ved|*ted|*zed

which you can expand to other combinations ending with "ed". It's not a perfect search (so to speak), but it does find some instances of the past perfect. Note that you can't simply write

*ed

because a wildcard like this must be accompanied by a string of at least three characters.

Tatoeba kun on vapaaehtoishanke, yleensä ei kannata valittaa siitä että jotain on liikaa. Sen sijaan kannattaa lisätä itse sitä, mitä näkee liian vähän.

Eli: Kirjoita uusia hollanninkielisiä lauseita, jotka käyttävät aliedustettua aikamuotoa. Kun käännät lauseita, lisää järjestelmällisesti kaikenlaiset käännökset, tai vuorottele niiden välillä, tai lisää ensisijaisesti aliedustettuja käännöksiä.

(Myös nimet ”Tom” ja ”Mary” ovat yliedustettuja monissa kielissä. Suosittelen käyttämään muitakin nimiä ja erityisesti lisäämään lauseita, joissa on hollannille ominaisia nimiä.)

CK, I wonder why English-Esperanto doesn't show up in your list?
http://www.manythings.org/bilingual

Given the very nature of Esperanto as a constructed language, there are very few "native" speakers. (There is no "Esperantlando" country yet!) Still, with over 610,000 sentences--the fifth largest in the corpus--it is not negligeable either. (Understandably, not all of them would make it to List 907.)

On your list, there are many languages with only a few hundreds sentences (e.g. Albanian, Cebuano, Tamil etc.) With millions of Esperanto speakers world-wide, it is quite possible that some speakers of those few-sentence-languages know Esperanto. By making English-Esperanto available, it could provide them an additional venue to explore English further.

IIRC, the current tokenizer is Jim Breen himself, manually annotating sentences in this format. I guess it would be possible to take the tokenization e.g. Mecab outputs and massage it into something more like the "B lines" format, but it won't be of similar quality.

You could ask Jim via a private message. His username is JimBreen.

It's best to use example.com or http://example.com, a URL set up for this kind of thing.


We have some sentences using this.

https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...ry=example.com

Jos haluat vain nähdä uusia lauseita, voit etsiä satunnaisia lauseita. Luultavasti et ole nähnyt kaikkia näytettäviä. https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...&sort_reverse=

Mikäli haluat kääntää lauseita, niin kiellä hakua näyttämästä lauseita, joilla on jo käännös. https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc...&sort_reverse=

Molemmissa tapauksissa vaihda etsittävää sanaa oikeassa sivupalkissa olevasta valikosta ja etsi myös käyttäen oikean sivupalkin valikkoa (tietokonenäkymässä, en tiedä muista laitteista).

Jos haluat käyttää lauseita johonkin muuhun tarkoitukseen, kannattanee ladata tietokanta ja etsiä lauseita sieltä. Muut osaavat auttaa tässä minua paremmin.

Wenn du alle deutschen Sätze brauchst, musst du dir entweder http://downloads.tatoeba.org/ex...tences.tar.bz2 oder http://downloads.tatoeba.org/ex...tailed.tar.bz2 herunterladen und dann die deutschen Sätze herausfiltern. (siehe https://tatoeba.org/deu/downloads für mehr Infos).

** Sentence Owners' Languages **

http://tatoeba.byethost3.com/20...anguages3.html

This will perhaps be a more useful page, since it's limited to members with declared native languages who own native language sentences.

I am afraid that at present, there is no way to do that other than checking their profiles.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but you can find all profiles explicitly mentioning English and Portuguese:

https://www.google.co.uk/search...r%2Fprofile%2F

Thanks a lot :) It's amazing you haven't forgotten to use the vocative case, nice one!

Happy birthday, Deniko!!!!

Aseggaz ameggaz i waytma d sitma!

Happy New Amazigh year to evryone in Algeria and the world.

These may not have really been viral, since almost all translations for the first sentence are by one member.

[#7697543] Bedouins live in the desert.

I didn't check the others.

Half of the names for people, though two-thirds of the often male names (Omid and Dilshid seem to not be gender-specific), are 'Tom'. This is still far too many for purposes of name diversity.

On the other hand, 'Mary' and other too often used 'standard' words did not propagate severely, according to this list.