Re: Terkunan: rules for deriving nouns, verbs, adjectives

Hi!

Jörg Rhiemeier writes:
>...
> Right.  I am not 'bashing' Terkunan, either; it is just that I see some
> points where it falls short of its goals - I pointed them out in order
> to be helpful.  Unfortunately, it seems that Henrik does not accept
> our help.
I do.  But I rejected some proposals of changes that were against my
design goals.  I am very happy about the suggestions even when I think
they are against my design goals, because it helps me understand what
you think is wrong.

So don't let us get too involved, I am still enjoying this very much!
:-)

>...
>>       For the rest of the words, I alter the input
>> to simulate effects the GMP currently does not account for.
>
> So why does the GMP not account for these "effects"?
Aha!

The GMP currently cannot distinguish between morphological endings and
normal stem ends, because I was too lazy to program that.

To do it properly, i would have to introduce some kind of morpheme
separator to be able to state rules like: the -t in endings drops
(e.g.  in the 3rd person singular) and the vowel in endings becomes
-@.  I haven't done that yet because it's a lot of work and there's a
trick around it that works just the same.

That vowel reduction is currently implemented in the GMP by simply
shifting the last syllable's vowel to -e.  This means that there are
restrictions on the use of the GMP: the Perl script only works as
expected if the last syllable is indeed an ending.  E.g. it cannot
distinguish whether -uum should become -u-@m or -u:m.

You said yourself: there are two things to account for: sound shifts,
and morphological deterioration.  I do the latter before shifting,
carefully selecting something that produces a result identical to what
would be produced if the deterioration was handled right within the
GMP somewhere.

> What happens in natural evolution of languages are *sound changes*;
> a proper simulation of language change simulates the sound changes,
> and does *not* resort to the kind of highly unnatural "technical
> tricks" you are using in Terkunan.
I am using the technical tricks only because there is a restriction on
when my current implementiation of the GMP works as expected.

These tricks are really, I promise, only for doing what you want: good
simulation.

>> In short: I think I do exactly what you want me to do.
>
> No, you don't.
Yes, I do. :-)

> Ray and I have pointed out what is wrong with your approach.  Is it
> so hard to understand?
It seems so.  But we're coming closer to understanding each other.

**Henrik