Re: polysynthetic languages

On Saturday, September 20, 2003, at 10:37 , John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
[snip]

>> The only morphemes fused are two: first person + singular
>
> That was what I meant by saying that the last three categories (tense,
> mood, voice) were represented by zero in this case.
Yes - but if we modified Latin so that it became agglutinating, -o:
would at most become just two morphemes and, judging by Hungarian and
Turkish, probably stay as one as singular seems to be unmarked.

> But I was mostly
> speaking in the ironic mood.  :-)
That's the trouble with email - you can't see the body language or hear
the intonation, despite the odd smiley.

>> Several years ago I wrote a Prolog program to parse Latin verbs,
>
> I'd love to see this.  Can you release it?
Actually it was written in Turbo Prolog, which is non-standard, about 12
years back. The Prolog Development Center has now replaced Turbo Prolog
with Visual Prolog (also non-standard).

I no longer have an electronic copy of the program.  Chunks of the coding
is given in hard copy in my MSc dissertation and I could probably
reconstruct it from that.  But I it might take a bit of time and I've got
only
a freeware Prolog version on my machine.

Ray
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