Characteristics of the Danish language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Danish, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number, case and definiteness) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.
Danish has two genders for nouns: neuter and common. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Danish has two cases for nouns: nominative and genitive.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | neuter | det dejlige hus (the lovely house) |
| common | den dejlige aften (the lovely evening) | |
| number | singular | nyt ur (new watch) |
| plural | nye ure (new watches) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | aften |
| genitive | aftens | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | rødt æble (red apple) |
| verb tenses | present | han går (he goes) |
| past | han gik (he went) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Danish is the following:
preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun
See for example:
om disse tre populære bøger
about these three popular books[pl]
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
Danish nouns are inflected for number (singular/plural), case (nominative/genitive), and definiteness (indefinite/definite). Nouns should be added to the lexicon with their grammatical gender if they do not inflect regularly. If the lexicon entry is missing, the NLG platform tries to find the most probable gender based on heuristics.
Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives, numerals and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for aften (evening) contains:
- gender: common
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | aften | aftener |
| Genitive | aftens | afteners |
The lexicon above expects the indefinite forms of the noun. The definite forms are automatically inflected as the below examples show:
aften -> aftenen
(evening -> the evening)
hus -> huset
(house -> the house)
Note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Danish with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table encodes gender, case, number and definiteness. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".
Verbs
Danish verbs do not inflect for person or number, but only vary according to tense.
The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects incorrectly, you should add it to the lexicon.
Container settings
Determiners
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Danish: definite, indefinite, demonstrative, and possessive.
The definite article in Danish is mostly expressed by a suffix on the noun. An additional definite article is only added to noun phrases with adjectives or numerals. See for example:
den nye flaske
(the new bottle)
vs.
flasken
(the bottle)
Numerals
The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.
| cardinal | ordinal | |
|---|---|---|
| text | ni dage (nine days) | den niende dag (the ninth day) |
| digit | 9 dage (9 days) | den 9. dag (the 9th day) |
For Danish, both cardinal and ordinal numerals up to 20 and multiples of 10 up to 100 (e.g. 30, 40, etc.) are written out on the platform. The outputs of other numerals are in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example (written out vs. digit):
tyve biler
(twenety cars)
halvtreds biler
(fifty cars)
vs.
21 biler
(21 cars)
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container (Germany) are: preposition="i" and case="nom".
i Tyskland
(in Germany)
For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Iceland), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="i", case="nom"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from i to på:
på Kreta
(in Crete)