By Ian Fisher, 27 June 2024 Subscribe
Polygrammarous is a web app that I built to visualize the grammatical structure of languages other than English. It's based on linguistic typology, the classification of languages according to their structural features.
You can use the control panel to create a grammar of your own design, and watch as the English sentence re-arranges itself to reflect the new rules. Or, you can choose a preset to see how the grammatical structure of a different real language would manifest itself with English words. Most of the linguistic features have hover-over text with extended descriptions.
I've simplified some things to fit the example sentence and the set of languages supported. For instance, there is much more nuance to nominal inflection, verb conjugation, and grammatical gender than just a binary "yes/no" setting. Adjunct position is not really a linguistic parameter, but it was necessary to get the order of the words to match. The "both" option for adpositions exists to accommodate Chinese, although the initial "preposition" is really a verb, and Chinese is conventionally considered a postposition language. The nominal inflections and gender endings in English are based on the grammar of Old English, not on the actual endings in the translated sentences.
If you want to learn more, the World Atlas of Language Structures has a catalogue of almost 200 hundred linguistic features and an interactive map.
Thank you to Elliott Bolzan, Qi Xiao, Wenjun Li, Jaseem Abid, and Faliha Awan for help with the translations, and Jacob Zimmerman for suggesting the name. ∎