Thanks Jonathan, Thanks Kevin, I've taken a closer look at the suggestions. Indeed, the nouns that are derived from nouns kind of belong to two classes. Thus, mtengo becomes mitengo in the plural and this morphology is maintained even for its derivations kamtengo, timitengo...
Zanga. On Fri, Aug 28, 2026 at 3:15 PM Jonathan Washington <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes, that should work. But it's almost certainly not what you want. Please > have a closer look at Kevin's message and part 2 of my message. > > Happy to discuss further or clarify anything that you didn't follow. > > -- > Jonathan > > On Fri, Aug 28, 2026, 01:57 Zanga Chimombo <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Indeed mtengo<n><cl3><cl12><sg> produces the desired effect, thanks! >> >> On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 5:28 PM Jonathan Washington >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> > Hi Zanga, >> > >> > Two things come to mind: >> > >> > 1. If your analysis yields >> > ^kamtengo/mtengo<n><cl3><cl12><sg>$ >> > >> > then to generate "kamtengo" it should basically look like exactly the >> > reverse of that: >> > ^mtengo<n><cl3><cl12><sg>/kamtengo$ >> > >> > So you'd want to provide as input mtengo<n><cl3><cl12><sg>, not >> > mtengo<n><sg><cl12>. >> > >> > But: >> > >> > 2. In Bantu languages (on which I'm not am expert, so feel free correct me >> > if I get anything wrong) class is a lexical property of a noun and an >> > inflectional property of an adjective. If correct, that means that the >> > tags are subcategory tags for nouns and grammatical tags for adjectives. >> > See >> > https://wikis.swarthmore.edu/ling073/Grammar_documentation#Morphological_analyses >> > and the included diagram for more details on this. >> > >> > Whether or not this is the case, it doesn't really make sense to have two >> > class tags on a given noun or adjective. It would be like, if you derive >> > verbs into nouns (as in "I took a long _run_") or inflect verbs into nouns >> > (as in "_Running_ is part of my morning routine"), you wouldn't want both >> > a verb tag and a noun tag, because then all your downstream tools would be >> > confused about whether the word is a verb or a noun. There are a couple >> > reasonable alternatives here: >> > a. use derivational and inflectional tags: run<v><iv><nmlz><sg>/run and >> > run<v><iv><vn>/running. (<nmlz> for "nominalised" and <vn> for "verbal >> > noun", but these aren't tags currently used by apertium-eng, and you could >> > use anything that makes sense here.) >> > b. relexicalise the new words: run<n><sg>/run, running<n><sg>/running. >> > Here you treat the new form as a new word. Note that the lemma changes >> > here too (but wouldn't change further as those forms inflect). >> > c. a good balance in this case might be to lexicalise the derived forms >> > and treat the inflected forms as inflected: run<n><sg>/run, >> > run<v><iv><vn>/running. >> > >> > In your case, I think you have a couple options too: >> > a. Treat the derived forms as lexicalised (which come with new POS and >> > subcategory tags), so you'd have both mtengo<n><cl12> and mtengo<n><cl3> >> > in your lexicon, and both could take the full range of inflection. This >> > looks like it's in line with what Kevin suggests (and then disambiguate >> > using CG or similar if the forms are ambiguous). If all class 12 nouns do >> > this, then you might want to automate the derivation within your >> > transducer so you only have to enter each of these once. >> > b. Treat the derived forms as inflection, for which you'd need a new tag, >> > like mtengo<n><cl12><dim> or mtengo<n><cl12><→cl3> or similar. >> > c. Treat the inflection (locatives sound like they could be?) differently >> > than derivation (diminutives could probably be considered either >> > inflection or derivation) in this regard. >> > >> > >> > I'll also add two things: >> > >> > - Languages with prefixational morphology are a lot easier to deal with >> > in lexd than lexc. >> > >> > - Usually matching the order of tags in adjectives (where noun subcategory >> > tags and noun grammatical tags are both grammatical tags) to tags in nouns >> > makes sense. So it'd be kakakulu/kulu<adj><cl12><sg>. >> > >> > -- >> > Jonathan >> > >> > >> > On Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 04:33 Kevin Brubeck Unhammer <[email protected]> >> > wrote: >> >> >> >> > There are certain classes of nouns in ciBantu which are derived from >> >> > other nouns. Namely, dimunitives (classes 12 and 13) as well as >> >> > locatives - on, at and in - (16, 17 and 18). I believe I have set up >> >> > the noun morphotactics adequately >> >> > https://github.com/apertium/apertium-nya/blob/main/apertium-nya.nya.lexc >> >> > and indeed it seems to analyze correctly: >> >> > echo kamtengo kakakulu | lt-proc nya.automorf.bin >> >> > ^kamtengo/mtengo<n><cl3><cl12><sg>$ ^kakakulu/kulu<adj><sg><cl12>$ >> >> >> >> Your analysis mtengo<n><cl3><cl12><sg> suggests that kamtengo is both >> >> class 3 and class 12 at the same time. But then you say cl3 is dropped – >> >> is there actually an ambiguity between cl3 and cl12? In that case, the >> >> correct analysis should be >> >> >> >> $ echo kamtengo kakakulu | lt-proc nya.automorf.bin >> >> ^kamtengo/mtengo<n><cl3><sg>/mtengo<n><cl12><sg>$ >> >> ^kakakulu/kulu<adj><sg><cl12>$ >> >> >> >> If you have both mtengo<n><cl3><sg> and mtengo<n><cl12><sg> in your >> >> lexc, then you should be able to generate mtengo<n><sg><cl12> as well. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> >> Apertium-stuff mailing list >> >> [email protected] >> >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff >> > >> > _______________________________________________ >> > Apertium-stuff mailing list >> > [email protected] >> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Apertium-stuff mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff > > _______________________________________________ > Apertium-stuff mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff _______________________________________________ Apertium-stuff mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
