Turkic lexicon

Some notes on how to go about making a Turkic lexicon for use in Apertium.

Layout

General points:

• The lexicon will be made in one file, it will have the suffix .lexc
• The file will be laid out in the following order:
  1. The multicharacter symbols
  2. The Root lexicon, pointing to the stem lexicons
  3. The morphotactics (continuation lexica)
  4. The stem lexicons

Multicharacter symbols

Morphological categories must be encased in < and > tags. They may contain the letters a-z and numbers 0-9. In extreme cases they may include the letters A-Z They must begin with a letter, they may not begin with a number.

Examples:

• %<n%> Noun
• %<p3%> Third person
• %<evid%> Evidential

For information on archiphonemes, see the corresponding page.

The list of symbols should be laid out in the following order:

• The major parts of speech
• The morphological categories
• Archiphonemes
• Other symbols, e.g. Morpheme boundary, ' ', '-' etc.

Every symbol should have a comment. The comments should line up.

Morphotactics

Naming continuation lexica

• Continuation lexica will be named in upper case, and may contain letters, numbers and the symbol -.
  • Examples: LEXICON N1, LEXICON DET-DEM, LEXICON ADV

What sorts of distinctions to make

TODO: TV vs. IV, Russian vs. non-Russian in Chuvash

Stem lexicons

TODO: Why stems go in lexicon and not infinitives

Lines in the stem lexicons should follow the following pattern:

• Left side (lexical form)
• Colon :
• Right side (surface form)
• Space
• Continuation lexicon
• Space
• Semicolon ;
• Space
• Exclamation mark
• Open quote "
• Gloss (optional)
• Close quote "

Example:

кӗнеке:кӗнек N2 ; ! "llibre, книга"

Morphophonology

TODO: px3 is sIn (and why)

Categorisation

Nominals

Compound Nouns

TODO: N-N compounds with <px3>

Adjectives

• A1: adjectives that can be both substantivised and adverbialised;
  • All three readings (<adj>, <adj.subst> and <adj.advl>)
  • have comparison levels.
• A2: derived/not fully lexicalised adjectives without adverbial reading
  • <adj> and <adj.subst> readings
  • have comparison levels.
• A3: derived/not fully lexicalised adjectives without adverbial reading
  • so-called "predicatives" (бар, жоқ)
  • no comparison levels at all.
• A4: "pure" adjectives
  • no adverbial and substantive readings,
  • no comparison levels;

Postpositions

TODO: "postpositions" which take poss./case are nouns

Non-finite verbs

This section outlines what categories of non-finite verb forms exist in Turkic, and how to identify the type of category created by a given affix.

Language specific issues

Turkmen: stem-final voiced and voiceless stops

In Turkmen, there are three types of stem-final stops:

• voiced stops
• voiceless stops
• stops that are voiceless syllable finally and voiced intervocalically

TODO: finish description of this and explain how it can be / is dealt with