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Senses and their statements should not be tied to a language, but instead shared between languages
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Description

As it stands now, we have L3257-S1 (apple - english) with glosses in 7 languages and translations in 5. One of these translations, L53267-S1 (manzana - espanol) has the same meaning but only 3 glosses and 3 translation statements. Unifying all glosses and their statements across all language variants of a sense manually is very time consuming and tedious.

I'd suggest improving this process by not binding senses to a specific language. Have all glosses and statements linked to a particular sense (as it is now), and then link that single sense to all respective languages, to avoid missing or duplicated data.

Event Timeline

This sounds like a really good idea. We would probably need a new namespace: Sense for this to work.

This is not a good idea. Each language has its own semantic framework and as such two senses which are even glossed the same way in at least one language do not necessarily mean exactly the same thing. An example:

  • English makes a semantic distinction between a rock and a stone. A rock in English is a naturally occurring feature, whereas a stone can broadly include man made objects such as milestones, gemstones, headstones and so on.
  • Most languages do not have the rock/stone distinction, and speakers of those languages would likely find it intuitive to gloss both English words the same way.
  • German makes a completely different semantic distinction that most English speakers would never consider. The word fels is used for rocks, unless the rock is a glacial erratic specifically, in which case it is a findling. Findlings are not instances of fels in German.
  • A German speaker unaware of this may gloss the English word simply as "fels," not knowing that the English word for rock is not semantically equivalent to any German word. A rock in English means fels *and* findling.

Now it may sound ridiculous out of context to say that Germans don't have a word for rocks, but this is technically correct. Senses exist to describe rocks in every language, but those senses are rarely exact matches to each other. In this example of apples, how would we know if one language treats apples and pears as the same fruit? (If this sounds odd, consider how odd "pineapple" looks to non-English speakers.) Senses are ultimately language-specific and should be treated as such.

A sense doesn't need glosses in every language. Any sense with "item for this sense" linking to the same "apple" item can be linked to any of the numerous interlingual labels on the item itself.

Lydia_Pintscher subscribed.

Yes. This was a deliberate design decision that I don't think we want to reverse for the reason @mrephabricator provides.