Entries with apostrophes need a little bit of special treatment, e.g.
- "I have" in French j'ai https://lingopolo.org/french/word/i-have
- "this is" in French c'est https://lingopolo.org/french/word/this-is-it-is
- "there is" in Italian c’è https://lingopolo.org/italian/word/there-is
In each case:
- if possible, add a Literal Breakdown which links to where each part comes from. This will help the student to understand the different parts of the entry, just as a Literal Breakdown of a phrase helps the student understand what each word in a phrase is. For example, you will see on https://lingopolo.org/french/word/i-have that the French, j’ai, can be broken down into 2 parts:"I (before a vowel sound)" (j’) and "have; am having" (ai). This will enable Lingopolo to automatically gather all the Examples of use; for example https://lingopolo.org/french/word/i-0 currently has 21 examples of "I" in use.
- add a Literal Breakdown to the short form by actually putting the full form in the breakdown. For example, on the entry https://lingopolo.org/french/word/i-0 you will see the French, j’, can be broken down into 1 part:"I" (je). This helps the student to understand what the full long form is for this abbreviation. As another example of this, see https://lingopolo.org/french/word/this-it-0 you will see the French, c’, can be broken down into 1 part:"this; it" (ce). Lingopolo will give a warning message that the Literal Breakdown does not quite match, but that's ok, because this is an instance where we deliberately make the Literal Breakdown not quite match the entry itself.
- use the audio of the full form on the short form. To begin with Lingopolo tried to be strict, and record these short forms exactly as they were written. This didn't work at all; it was nearly impossible to pronounce what is usually just a consonant which is never pronounced on its own, and the weird pronunciation was not helpful to students. Now we just use the pronunciation of the full form on the short form, and everything works out very well. For example, https://lingopolo.org/french/word/i-0 uses for the pronunciation of j’ the pronunciation of the full form je shown in the Literal Breakdown. This actually then works out very nicely for the student, because in an entry like https://lingopolo.org/french/word/i-like they can play the audio for each of the entries in the Literal Breakdown (with the pronunciation of j’ the pronunciation of the full form je) and then the student can listen to how the parts sound when pronounced together.