How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 16

The Phoenician alphabet had letters only for consonants, not for vowels; the Hebrew and Arabic scripts grew from the same family and are still often written without vowels.

Who acts: Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew scripts · What happens: have, grow, write · To what, where: letters

This is a sentence of the lesson «How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet» of the history course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew scripts), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	3 alphabet	det
2	Phoenician	phoenician	ADJ	Degree=Pos	3 alphabet	amod
3	alphabet	alphabet	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 had	nsubj
4	had	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
5	letters	letter	NOUN	Number=Plur	4 had	obj
6	only	only	ADV	_	8 consonants	advmod
7	for	for	ADP	_	8 consonants	case
8	consonants	consonant	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 letters	nmod
9	,	,	PUNCT	_	12 vowels	punct
10	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	12 vowels	advmod
11	for	for	ADP	_	12 vowels	case
12	vowels	vowel	NOUN	Number=Plur	8 consonants	conj
13	;	;	PUNCT	_	19 grew	punct
14	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	18 scripts	det
15	Hebrew	Hebrew	PROPN	Number=Sing	18 scripts	compound
16	and	and	CCONJ	_	17 Arabic	cc
17	Arabic	Arabic	PROPN	Number=Sing	15 Hebrew	conj
18	scripts	script	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 grew	nsubj
19	grew	grow	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	4 had	parataxis
20	from	from	ADP	_	23 family	case
21	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	23 family	det
22	same	same	ADJ	Degree=Pos	23 family	amod
23	family	family	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 grew	obl
24	and	and	CCONJ	_	28 written	cc
25	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	28 written	aux:pass
26	still	still	ADV	_	28 written	advmod
27	often	often	ADV	_	28 written	advmod
28	written	write	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	19 grew	conj
29	without	without	ADP	_	30 vowels	case
30	vowels	vowel	NOUN	Number=Plur	28 written	obl
31	.	.	PUNCT	_	4 had	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	when	other	roles by
1	have	past	the Phoenician alphabet	letters		for consonants and vowels	vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent letter=Patient
2	grow	past	the Hebrew scripts			from the same family	vn grow-26.2.1 «NP.product V PP.patient»: agent=Product from family=Patient
3	write	present · passive	the Hebrew scripts not said here		still	without vowels; often property	vn scribble-25.2-1 «NP V»

One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, mova-school-agreed-en.conllu) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence school:history:082-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet.lesson:16.

The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R7-rel-agree ×2. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the release 0.4.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/16/