How to handle plural variants?

[B Kh]

I'm creating a Sinhala learner's dictionary targeted at English speakers learning Sinhala for decoding and production.  

The new project file came with the variant type "Irregularly Inflected Form>Plural".

Sinhala has about 5 different "regular" ways plurals can be formed, not all of them obvious to the non-native speaker. There are also some irregularly formed plurals. 

So far, I have added a new variant type "Regular Plural". But now I'm thinking that doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of a learner's dictionary. Even the so called regular plurals have to be memorized. Therefore I'm thinking about merging the two variant types into one variant. (The AI bot tells me this can be done simply by renaming one variant to be identical to the other and they magically combine.)

Now I'm starting to use inflection features (barely understanding the whole process). I don't think I will be using the inflection features for plurals since there are so complicated.

Can folks offer some advice on if I am handling this all correctly, remembering that my goal is to create a learner's dictionary, not a technical linguistic analysis of the language.

Hope the question isn't too ambiguous. Please don't hesitate to tell me I'm doing it all wrong. :-)

[Andreas_Joswig]

The Irregularly Inflected form Variant type is a very useful tool if you want to show the irregular form in two places - directly as a variant under the main entry and also as a minor entry in its (say, alphabetical, which I know is not the best term talking about Sinhala) place in the sort order. So, for example, for English mouse and mice you could have a set-up such as

    mice pl. of mouse

    ...

    mince v to chop up into small pieces

    ...

    motor n engine

    ...

    mouse n small rodent, pl. mice   

Using variant forms, as far as I know, is the best way to achieve such a result through FLEx.

If you are not interested in finding the plural form in its own sorted spot, but just in the main entry, then FLEx provides the Exemplar field directly under the Sense level:

This field is intended to be used for inflectional forms that a learner would have to internalize, so you could put a plural form for each noun in this line, plus maybe any other form that my cause difficulties, best arranged in a fixed order that you would explain in the preface to the dictionary.

I can't tell you whether the AI assistant is correct with its claim about merging to variant types. Before you try this, make a backup!

Inflection features could be shown in a dictionary, but mostly they are intended as constraints for the FLEx parser, so most dictionary makers who don't have an interest in parsing don't make any use of them.

Warm greetings,

Andreas

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