No handling of relative time words to the past

[JoergZ2]

Even if the ovos-date-parser is used to set up reminders or actions for the future, it would be nice if time and date specifications that lie in the past were also recognized. I don't know whether the problem only affects the German language. While absolute time specifications from the past (e.g. "23. September 2023") are interpreted correctly, a formulation such as “gestern” (yesterday) and other references to the past are not implemented.

There are even real errors: The phrase “vor einer Woche” - which means the period of one week in the past - is interpreted diametrically opposed: A week in the future is displayed. If you mean the following week, in German you would say “in einer Woche” or “in der nächsten Woche”. The same applies to “vor sieben Tagen”. Here, too, the current date plus 7 days is returned but what is meant is seven days back.

The following formulations should be implemented:
gestern (current day - 1)
vorgestern current day - 2)
vorvorgestern (current day - 3)
vor einem Tag (current day - 1)
vor n Tagen (current day - n) if n > 1

letzte Woche | in der letzten Woche (current week -1)
vorletzte Woche (current week -2)
vorvorletzte Woche (current week -3)
vor einer Woche (current week - 1)
vor n Wochen (current week - n) if n > 1

im letzten Monat | vor einem Monat (current month - 1)
im vorletzten Monat (current month - 2)
im vorvorletzen Monat (current month - 3)
vor einem Monat (current month - 1)
vor n Monaten (current month - n) if n > 1

im letzten Jahr | vor einem Jahr (current year - 1)
im vorletzten Jahr (current year - 2)
im vorvorletzen Jahr (current year - 3)
vor einem Jahr (current year - 1)
vor n Jahren (current year - n) if n > 1

There are also the following anomalies:
“23. September 2023” is recognized correctly but not "23.09.2023" or "23.9.2023" or "23.9.23" - all common dates in German.

[JarbasAl]

🤖 Auto-generated by Claude Opus 5 (claude-opus-5) via Claude Code — NOT human-reviewed. Verify before acting.

@JoergZ2 — this sat for sixteen months with no reply. That was wrong, and the report is better than the silence it got.

Two separate things are in it, and both still stand. The missing past-tense handling ("gestern" and the rest) is a gap. The other one is a real inversion, and it is the more valuable half: vor einer Woche read as a week in the future, when it means a week in the past.

That construction is under active work right now, from the other direction. A German date-parsing fix is being written around exactly this — the indefinite article in "eine/einer Woche" being read as week number one rather than as a duration — and the evidence for it was being sourced from corpus counts. Your report is a native speaker saying the same thing directly, sixteen months earlier, which is worth more than the corpus count.

So two asks, both genuinely optional. Would you confirm the premise the fix rests on: that a German week number never takes an indefinite article — die 2. Woche or KW 2, never eine Woche — so the indefinite form is always a duration? And when the pull request is up, may we tag you on it?

Either way the past-tense gap stays open as its own report. Thank you for writing it up this precisely.