[open-humanities] Open Databases for Verb Morphology

Fri Jan 20 10:58:03 UTC 2012

It isn't in the core functionality, as far as I'm aware, but I wonder if 
it would be possible to reverse engineer such a set of lists from the 
Open Source "Morpheus" code published by The Perseus Project (see 
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource), which enables 
morphological parsing of declined Greek (or Latin, Italian, Arabic) 
forms. E.g. if you enter the verb form χρησθῆναι, it will return:

χράω2 proclaim
χρησθῆναι verb aor inf pass

And does a pretty good job with irregular verbs etc.

As I understand (without having looked at the underlying code) Morpheus 
is built on a ruleset rather than a database of possible forms, but you 
might be able to adapt the code to generate such.

HTH,

Gabby

On 2012-01-19 18:08, James Harriman-Smith wrote:
> Hi Norma,
>
> And thanks for the mail.
>
> <Got an  example? >
>
> I'm afraid that I haven't any examples of such a thing online, but what
> I'm looking for would be a database that had, say, (using English
> regular verbs as an archetype), all the possible variants on the verb
> 'walk' in it, catalogued accordingly: 'walk' as infinitive, and, for the
> present tense indicative mood, first-second person singular, and
> first-second-third person plural (among others); 'walks' as third person
> singular; etc.
>
> I've been working on this for a web app that would interrogate a users
> knowledge of Ancient Greek verbs: http://verbgymnasium.com - it
> currently runs off a set of php arrays that I made myself, but if the
> amount of work needed to include verbs other than the regular verb 'luo'
> is rather intimidating....
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> James
>
> On 19 January 2012 18:41, Norma Leistiko <normaleistiko at me.com
> <mailto:normaleistiko at me.com>> wrote:
>
>     Got an  example? I am on the lookout and would love to find this
>     too. But an example to us in English would be very useful. I think I
>     understand, but example would help.
>
>     Norma Leistiko
>     normaleistiko at me.com <mailto:normaleistiko at me.com>
>     Reference Librarian, on-call in
>     Portland Oregon area
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     On Jan 19, 2012, at 2:06 AM, James Harriman-Smith wrote:
>
>>     Hi everyone,
>>
>>     Does anyone know of an open database for verb morphology
>>     (containing a collection of all the possible conjugations of a
>>     single (or several) verb archetype)? I'm particularly interested
>>     in Ancient Greek, but would be curious about resources for other
>>     languages, dead or alive.
>>
>>     Let me know,
>>
>>     James
>>
>>     P.S. No sign of such a thing on http://thedatahub.org
>>     <http://thedatahub.org/> ...

-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
(Research Associate in Digital Epigraphy)

Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

Email: gabriel.bodard at kcl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1388
Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/