Starting a new language with lttoolbox

For information on how to install lttoolbox, see lttoolbox and minimal installation from SVN

This page is going to describe how to start a new language with lttoolbox. As lttoolbox is not really suited to agglutinative languages, or languages with complex and regular morphophonology (see starting a new language with HFST), we're going to work on one with simpler and less regular morphology.

Preliminaries

A morphological transducer in lttoolbox has typically one file, a .dix file. This defines both how morphemes in the language are joined together, morphotactics, and how changes happen when these morphemes are joined together, morphographemics (or morphophonology). For example,

• Morphotactics: wolf<n><pl> → wolf + s
• Morphographemics: wolf + s → wolves

These two phenomena are treated in the same file.

The language

The language we will be modelling is Upper Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken in Germany. There is a limited grammar available in English here and that is what we will be basing our analysis on. The part of speech we're going to look at for this small tutorial is nouns. Nouns in Upper Sorbian have seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative), three numbers (singular, dual, plural) and three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). Like other Slavic languages, the category of animacy is distinguished in the masculine.

Paradigms

Here we give four example paradigms, these will form the basis of our implementation.

Masculine animate (nan "father")

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	nan	nanaj	nanojo
Genitive	nana	nanow	nanow
Dative	nanej	nanomaj	nanam
Accusative	nana	nanow	nanow
Instrumental	nanom	nanomaj	nanami
Locative	nanje	nanomaj	nanach
Vocative	nano!	nanaj!	nanojo!

Masculine inanimate (hrěch "sin")

The differences from the masculine animate paradigm are indicated in blue.

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	hrěch	hrěchaj	hrěchi
Genitive	hrěcha	hrěchow	hrěchow
Dative	hrěchej	hrěchomaj	hrěcham
Accusative	hrěch	hrěchaj	hrěchi
Instrumental	hrěchom	hrěchomaj	hrěchami
Locative	hrěchu	hrěchomaj	hrěchach
Vocative	hrěcho!	hrěchaj!	hrěchi!

Feminine (wróna "crow")

The parts in common with the masculine paradigms are highlighted in green.

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	wróna	wrónje	wróny
Genitive	wrónu	wrónow	wrónaow
Dative	wrónje	wrónomaj	wrónaam
Accusative	wrónu	wrónje	wróny
Instrumental	wrónu	wrónomaj	wrónaami
Locative	wrónje	wrónomaj	wrónaach
Vocative	wróna!	wrónje!	wrónu!

Neuter (trašidło "monster")

Forms in common with both the masculine and feminine paradigms are highlighted in red.

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nominative	trašidło	trašidłe	trašidła
Genitive	trašidła	trašidłow	trašidłow
Dative	trašidłu	trašidłomaj	trašidłam
Accusative	trašidło	trašidłe	trašidła
Instrumental	trašidłom	trašidłomaj	trašidłami
Locative	trašidłe	trašidłomaj	trašidłach
Vocative	trašidło!	trašidłe!	trašidła!

Lexicon

So, given the description above, how do we start to write a morphological description in lttoolbox ? Well, first we start with our filename, hsb.dix, so open up a text editor and save an empty document with that name.

The basics

The skeleton

The basic skeleton of an lttoolbox dictionary looks like the following:

<dictionary>
  <alphabet>abc...</alphabet>
  <sdefs>
    ...
  </sdefs>
  <pardefs>
    ...
  </pardefs>
  <section id="main" type="standard">
    ...
  </section>
</dictionary>

So type this up into the file, this gives the outline of our the main parts of our morphology: the alphabet (used for tokenisation) the symbols (or tags) which give us useful mnemonics for grammatical features, the <pardefs> section, which gives our inflectional paradigms, and finally the main section of the file which contains our lexical items.

Symbol (tag) definitions

The first thing we'll start with is the list of symbols which are going to encode our grammatical features (part-of-speech, gender, number, case). The page list of symbols gives some common tags in Apertium. Generally we try and keep features which are the same between languages tagged the same, thus for example the tag for "nominative" will be <nom>, regardless of if we are talking about Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Icelandic or Albanian. Symbols are defined in the <sdefs> section with <sdef> elements,

<sdefs>
  <sdef n="n"     c="Noun"/>

  <sdef n="ma"    c="Masculine (animate)"/>
  <sdef n="mi"    c="Masculine (inanimate)"/>
  <sdef n="nt"    c="Neuter"/>
  <sdef n="f"     c="Feminine"/>

  <sdef n="sg"    c="Singular"/>
  <sdef n="du"    c="Dual"/>
  <sdef n="pl"    c="Plural"/>

  <sdef n="nom"   c="Nominative"/>
  <sdef n="gen"   c="Genitive"/>
  <sdef n="dat"   c="Dative"/>
  <sdef n="acc"   c="Accusative"/>
  <sdef n="ins"   c="Instrumental"/>
  <sdef n="loc"   c="Locative"/>
  <sdef n="voc"   c="Vocative"/>
</sdefs>

See also

• Starting a new language with HFST