I have just got back from Eastgardens… And I thought I would have been longer. I need to grab some lunch in a minute, but I thought I would post a new entry here first.

Things were certainly not what I expected over there… I needed to go through an email my client receieved from one of his clinets. The work involves a speach synthesizer making different statements about the weather. This is fine, apart from two points. Firstly, I dont speak spanish, or any of the other languages with a major french basis. By that I mean I only speak english, and not any language with a concept of masculine and feminine adjectives.

Spanish (and we are talking European Spanish here specifically, although latin american spanish is most likely the same) has modifiers on words later on in the sentence. Temperature might be masculine, and wind speed might be feminine. So when you make a statement like “The {Temperature|Wind Speed} was 100 {units} *AT* 10 O’Clock”, the word *AT* changes depending on if we are talking about wind speed or temperature. This complicates the sentence structure, particularly when you have someone like me who needs to code this.

I at least knew about masculine and feminine words which at least put me ahead of my poor client. Although I should say that he does speak more than one language so had some idea at least. Anyway that was this mornings fun… Time for a slightly late lunch…