Characteristics of the Slovak language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Slovak, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.
Slovak has three genders for nouns: masculine (animate and inanimate), feminine and neuter. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Slovak has six cases for nouns.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | masculine inanimate | staré auto (an old car) |
| masculine animate | starý lekár (an old doctor) | |
| feminine | stará žena (an old woman) | |
| neuter | staré mesto (an old town) | |
| number | singular | staré auto (the old car) |
| plural | staré autá (the old cars) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | pes (dog) |
| accusative | Vidím psa. (I see the dog.) | |
| dative | Dám psovi loptu. (I give the ball to the dog.) | |
| genitive | Zvonček psa (dog' bell) | |
| locative | Vták pristane na psovi. (The bird lands on the dog.) | |
| instrumental | Slepec chodí so psom. (The blind man walks with a dog.) | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | červený dom (red house) |
| verb tenses | present | On robí (he does) |
| past | On robil (he did) | |
| participle passive | robený (done) | |
| future | On bude robiť (he will be doing) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Slovak is the following:
preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun
See for example:
o týchto troch populárnych knihách
about these three popular book
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
Slovak nouns are inflected for number and case. Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for pes (dog) contains:
- gender: masculine animate
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | pes | psi |
| Accusative | psa | psov |
| Dative | psovi | psom |
| Genitive | psa | psov |
| Locative | psovi | psoch |
| Instrumental | psom | psami |
Note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Slovak with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table encodes gender, case, and number. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".
Verbs
Slovak verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and in some cases gender. The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects incorrectly, you should add it to the lexicon.
Please note that the future tense can be formed in two ways. For imperfective verbs it is formed by taking the future tense conjugation of the verb byť (to be) and the infinitive (only the conjugated form needs to be in a container). For perfective verbs, the present form expresses the future. See for example the verbs robiť and urobiť:
budem robiť
(I will do [imperfective])
urobím
(I will do [perfective])
The participle passive is a verb form that can be used to build constructions in the passive voice. The AX platform will inflect the participle passive automatically:
Mária postavila dom. = Maria built the house. (active)
Dom bol postavený. = The house was built. (passive)
Container settings
Determiner
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Slovak: demonstrative, distal, proximal, possessive, and quantifier (every).
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 | jeden deň (one day) | prvý deň (the first day) |
| digit | 1 deň (1 day) | 1. deň (the 1st day) |
In Slovak, case and number for nouns and adjectives change based on numerals (if no other case than nominative or accusative is set). See for example:
| Numeral | case / number | example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nominative Singular | 1 červený dom (1 red house) |
| 2-4 | Nominative/Plural | 3 červené domy (3 red houses) |
| >= 5 | Genitive/Plural | 7 červených domov (7 red houses) |
For Slovak, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 12 on the platform, otherwise (above 12) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:
dvanásť áut
(12 cars)
vs.
13 áut
(13 cars)
With plurale tantum nouns (which only exist in the plural) the collective numeral forms are used. They do not inflect and enforce the genitive case. See an example below:
dvoje dverí
(2 (sets of) doors)
vs.
dve autá
(2 cars)
Prepositions
If users configure prepositions in the container, they are automatically adapted when vocalization is required. As the below example shows, the container settings for both examples are: preposition="z". However, o is added after s/z/v, if the next word starts with a similar or the same letter.
z domu
(from the house)
zo záhrady
(from the garden)
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container Nemecko (Germany) are: preposition="v" and case="loc".
v Nemecku
(in Germany)
For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Island (Iceland)), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="v", case="loc"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from v to na:
na Islande
(in Iceland)