Malayalam and English/documentation

Malayalam is both agglutinative and inflective language . it belong dravidian language category . In apertium we are trying to implement englaish malayalam pair using hfst .it is described here Starting_a_new_language_with_HFST

Morphotactic using lexc

let's take an example of a noun word , malayalam noun can have 8 inflections , nominative,dative, instrumental, locative ,accusative,vocative and sociative . it can be also classified on the basis on number ,singular and plural , let's declare essential symbols

Multichar_Symbols

%<n%>           ! Noun                        ! നാമം

%<nom%>         ! Nominative                  !

%<acc%>         ! Accusative                  !

%<dat%>         ! Dative                      !

%<soc%>         ! Sociative                   !

%<gen%>         ! Genitive                    !

%<ins%>         ! Instrumental                !

%<loc%>         ! Locative                    !

%<voc%>         ! Vocative                    !

%<sg%>          ! Singular                    !

%<pl%>          ! Plural                      !

Now we have all essential symbols for a noun , let's add an example paradigm

LEXICON Root

Miscellaneous ;
Conjunctions ; 
Postpositions ;
Pronouns ;
Determiners ;
Numerals ;
NominalStems ;

nouns

LEXICON N1 

%<n%>%<sg%>%<nom%>:ṁ CLIT-N-NOM ; ! ṁ
%<n%>%<sg%>%<loc%>:%>ttil‍ CLIT-N-LOC ; ! ttil
%<n%>%<sg%>%<acc%>:%>tte CLIT-N-ACC ; ! tte
%<n%>%<sg%>%<gen%>:%>ttinṟe CLIT-N-GEN ; ! ttinṟe
%<n%>%<sg%>%<dat%>:%>ttin CLIT-N ; ! ttin
%<n%>%<sg%>%<dat%>:%>ttinu CLIT-N ; ! ttinu ! debug
!plural
%<n%>%<pl%>%<nom%>:%>ṅṅaḷ‍ CLIT-N-NOM ; ! ṅṅaḷ‍
%<n%>%<pl%>%<acc%>:%>ṅṅaḷe CLIT-N-ACC ; ! ṅṅale
%<n%>%<pl%>%<gen%>:%>ṅṅaḷuṭe CLIT-N-GEN ; ! ṅṅaḷuṭe

and an example word

LEXICON NominalStems
mēghaṁ:mēgha N1 ; ! mēghaṁ ! cloud

Currently there are 10 noun paradigms ,N1 N2 ,...N10

General trends in paradigms

LEXICON N1 :- Words ending with anusuvara( ം )

LEXICON N2 :- words ending with the vowel a or i

LEXICON N3 :- words ending with virama or a vowel

LEXICON N4 :- words ending with the vowel a or i

LEXICON N5 :- words ends with virama (eg വീട് )

LEXICON N6 :- for the word പേര്‍ (pēr‍)

LEXICON N7 :-words ends with the vowel u

LEXICON N8 :-

LEXICON N9 :-

LEXICON N10 :-

Proper Nouns

• LEXICON NP* is for proper nouns , nature of the proper nouns are almost similar to nouns

• LEXICON NP*-COG is for second name

• LEXICON NP-TOP-* represents place names

they are

1. NP-TOP-KERALA :- Place names ending with anusuvara
2. NP-TOP-INDIA :- Place names ending with the vowel a or i
3. NP-TOP-CALICUT :- Place names ending with virama
4. NP-TOP-KANNUR :- Place names ending with chillu
5. NP-TOP-MALABAR : -place name ending with chillu R(ര്‍ )
6. NP-TOP-JAPAN :- place names ending with chilllu ന്‍
7. NP-TOP-BRAZIL :-place name ending with chillu ല്‍

ProNouns

• PRON-PERS-* represents personal pronouns

they are

1. PRON-PERS-NNAAN :-
2. PRON-PERS-NII :-
3. PRON-PERS-AVAN :-
4. PRON-PERS-AVAL :-
5. PRON-PERS-NNANNAL
6. PRON-PERS-NAAM
7. PRON-PERS-NINNAL
8. PRON-PERS-AVAR
9. PRON-PERS-ADDEHA

• PRON-DEM is for demonstrative pronoun

they are

1. PRON-DEM-AT
2. PRON-DEM-IT

• PRON-IND is for Indefinite pronoun

Numbers

NUM for numerals

Verbs

currently 25+ verb paradigms are added to lexc , unlike noun , it is difficult to predict paradigm by checking word pattern

Verb paradigm are of the form

LEXICON V-TV-ARIYUKA

%<v%>%<tv%>: V-COMMON-ARIYUKA ; ! ""

and

LEXICON V-IV-KALI

%<v%>%<iv%>: V-COMMON-KALI ; ! ""

here IV-Intransitive Verb

TV-Transitive Verb

continuation paradigm v-common-* is added to both