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saeb saeb June 8, 2010 June 8, 2010 at 4:53:40 AM UTC link Permalink

revisiting sentence variation...

I came across a sentence in arabic (thx to qahwa's comment)...one of my sentences :D...It shows a property of the arabic script that I want to document with 3 or 4 variations:

هل استلمتَ الرسالة؟
Did you(male) receive the letter?

هل استلمتِ الرسالة؟
Did you(fem) receive the letter?

هل استلمَتْ الرسالة؟
Did she receive the letter?

without the harakaat (vowel marks) they're all written the same.
Now if I do add them, I'm afraid they'll just get reported as similar sentences and get merged/deleted/etc... (I mean the english sentences ofc)

what's tatoeba's 'official' statement on how to deal with this?

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brauliobezerra brauliobezerra June 8, 2010 June 8, 2010 at 3:01:09 PM UTC link Permalink

Similar things happen in Portuguese

Esse é seu brinquedo.

can be

[Hey, you, ]
This is your toy.

[Bob likes to play.]
This is his toy.

[Mary likes to play.]
This is her toy.

[Tex the armadillo likes to play.]
This is its toy.

There are unambiguous ways to say these sentences in Portuguese, but they are not used that often.

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MUIRIEL MUIRIEL June 8, 2010 June 8, 2010 at 8:41:18 PM UTC link Permalink

I don't think that this is the same problem as in Arabic.
It doesn't cause problems when Portuguese duplicates like your example are merged. But in Arabic it does. The example that saeb posted is the same *without* vowel marks, but with vowel marks, it's not anymore the same, and the pronounciation isn't the same neither. So it *looks* like a duplicate, but it isn't.

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Demetrius Demetrius June 9, 2010 June 9, 2010 at 4:07:28 PM UTC link Permalink

I don’t know about Arabic, but I personally prefer to differenciate sentences that are different in speech.

E.g. in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian one doesn’t normally mark stress, but when it’s important, I do (as in the case with зáмок/замóк in sentences No. 385729 and 385728).