What are Term parents?
"Term parents" are a way to:
- simplify your Term data management in Lute.
- help you build your own "mental map" of whatever language you're studying.
When reading English in Lute, you might see words like break, broke, and broken. These are all different forms of the word break. You can enter in "break" as the parent, track basic data there, like an image and definition, and that's used for popups etc. while reading. You don't have to enter the same data for all the "child terms" -- that would be tedious.
Sometimes, parents are useful to indicate very strong relationships between words as well. Examples:
- "kitten" - "cat"
- "gatito" - "gato" (Spanish)
- "Krankenhaus" - "krank" and "Haus" (German)
In these cases one "parent term" might refer to conjugations (break to broken), as well as other obvious joins (break to unbreakable).
Why call it a "parent", and not a "lemma" or "root form"?
Good question. From the above example, "break" is referred to as the "lemma" - aka the "canonical form", or "dictionary form"[^1]. But to me, that doesn't quite fit how my mind organizes the language -- with multiple parents and word families.
So, how should I use this?
There are no hard-and-fast rules. I mainly use "parent terms" for conjugations, and then I add in extra information if needed.
For example, as a basic German learner, I might have:
- gehen - to go (parent term)
- ging, with tag "past"
- gegangen, with tag "participle"
As a more advanced Spanish learner, I add the dozens of Spanish verb forms (quiero, quise, qerría, quisiera ...) as child terms of the root, and I sometimes link words I feel belong together, just for fun (e.g., "ternura" is a child term of "tierno").