Balkan languages

The Balkan languages are those languages spoken in the Balkans, and possibly forming a part of the Balkan Sprachbund. They include Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian, Aromanian, Albanian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and a number of others.

The master plan involves generating independent finite-state transducers for each language, and then making individual dictionaries and transfer rules for every pair. The current status of these goals is listed below.

Status

The ultimate goal is to have multi-purposable transducers for a variety of Balkan languages. These can then be paired for X→Y translation with the addition of a CG for language X and transfer rules / dictionary for the pair X→Y. Below is listed development progress for each language's transducers and dictionary pairs.

Transducers

Once a transducer has ~80% coverage on a range of medium-large corpora we can say it is "working". Over 90% and it can be considered to be "production".

name	Language	ISO 639		formalism	state	stems	paradigms	coverage	location	primary authors
		-2	-3
apertium-mkd	Macedonian	mk	mkd	lttoolbox	production	30,686	260	~90.5%	apertium-mkd (languages)	Fran, Tihomir, Petkovski
apertium-hbs	Serbo-Croatian	sh	hbs	lttoolbox	production	58,004	1,092	~90.5%	apertium-hbs (languages)	Fran, Petkovski, Aleš, hrvoj
apertium-slv	Slovenian	sl	slv	lttoolbox	production	20,596	1,435	~90.5%	apertium-hbs-slv (trunk) apertium-slv-pol (incubator) apertium-sl-mk (incubator)	Fran, Petkovski, Peradin, Aleš, Čabrilo, Dimitrijev
apertium-bul	Bulgarian	bg	bul	lttoolbox	production	8,578	317	~80%	apertium-bul (languages)	Fran, Tihomir
apertium-tur	Turkish	tr	tur	HFST	development	17,221	-	~87.3%	apertium-tur (languages)	Fran, Gianluca, Sezgi Aydın
apertium-sqi	Albanian	sq	sqi	lttoolbox	development	3,312	138	~80.2%	apertium-sqi (languages)	Fran
apertium-ell	Greek	el	ell	lttoolbox	prototype	2,460	951	-	apertium-ell (languages)	Fran
apertium-rup	Aromanian	-	rup	lttoolbox	prototype	312,005	26193	-	apertium-rup (incubator)	Fran, shopskasalata
apertium-ron	Romanian	ro	ron	lttoolbox	possibly non-existant	?	?	-	apertium-ron-rup (incubator)	Fran

Balkan Language Classification

The languages that share these similarities belong to five distinct branches of the Indo-European languages^[1]:

• Albanian: Arvanitika, Gheg, Tosk
• Hellenic languages: Standard Greek, Cappadocian Greek, Pontic Greek
• Romance languages: Aromanian, Romanian, Moldovan, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian
• Slavic languages
  • Western South Slavic: Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian
  • Eastern South Slavic: Bulgarian, Macedonian
• Indic languages: Romani

Existing language pairs

Text in italic denotes language pairs under development / in the incubator. Regular text denotes a functioning language pair in staging, while text in bold denotes a stable well-working language pair in trunk.

	mkd	hbs	slv	bul	tur	sqi	ell	rup	ron
mkd	-	hbs-mkd 12,813	sl-mk 25,579	mk-bg 8,783		mk-sq ?
hbs	hbs-mkd 12,813	-	hbs-slv 24,717
slv	sl-mk 25,579	hbs-slv 24,717	-
bul	mk-bg 8,783			-			bg-el 638
tur					-
sqi	mk-sq ?					-
ell				bg-el 638			-
rup								-	ron-rup 402
ron								ron-rup 402	-
aze					tur-aze 8,194
cat									ca-ro 16,431
ces		ces-hbs 167	cs-sl 570
chv					cv-tr 100
eng	mk-en 33,350	hbs-eng 16,228	sl-en 313	bg-en 10,242	tr-en 171	en-sq 580	ell-eng 830
epo				eo-bg ?	eo-tr 1,500		eo-el 1,150
fin		fin-hbs 250
fra									fr-ro 12,727
ina									ron-ina 192
ita			slv-ita 1,586						ro-it 10,093
kir					tur-kir 7,123
pol		pol-hbs 136	slv-pol 354
rus		hbs-rus 5,008		bg-ru 3,292
spa			slv-spa						es-ro 24,528
tat					tur-tat 3,317
tuk					tuk-tur 3,387
uzb					tur-uzb 3,519

Samples

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Language	Text
Macedonian	Сите човечки суштества се раѓаат слободни и еднакви по достоинство и права. Тие се обдарени со разум и совест и треба да се однесуваат еден кон друг во духот на општо човечката припадност.
Slovenian	Vsi ljudje se rodijo svobodni in imajo enako dostojanstvo in enake pravice. Obdarjeni so z razumom in vestjo in bi morali ravnati drug z drugim kakor bratje.
Bulgarian	Всички хора се раждат свободни и равни по достойнство и права. Те са надарени с разум и съвест и следва да се отнасят помежду си в дух на братство.
Turkish	Bütün insanlar hür, haysiyet ve haklar bakımından eşit doğarlar. Akıl ve vicdana sahiptirler ve birbirlerine karşı kardeşlik zihniyeti ile hareket etmelidirler.

See also

• North Germanic languages

External links

• TRMorph