How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 17

The Greeks borrowed the alphabet about 2,800 years ago and added vowels; the word «alphabet» comes from their first two letters, alpha and beta.

Who acts: Greeks, word, vowels · What happens: borrow, add, come, letter · To what, where: alphabet, vowels, first two 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 (Greeks, word, vowels), 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	2 Greeks	det
2	Greeks	Greek	PROPN	Number=Plur	3 borrowed	nsubj
3	borrowed	borrow	VERB	Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 alphabet	det
5	alphabet	alphabet	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 borrowed	obj
6	about	about	ADV	_	7 2,800	advmod
7	2,800	2,800	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	8 years	nummod
8	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	9 ago	obl:unmarked
9	ago	ago	ADV	_	3 borrowed	advmod
10	and	and	CCONJ	_	11 added	cc
11	added	add	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 borrowed	conj
12	vowels	vowel	NOUN	Number=Plur	11 added	obj
13	;	;	PUNCT	_	15 word	punct
14	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	15 word	det
15	word	word	NOUN	Number=Sing	19 comes	nsubj
16	«	«	PUNCT	_	17 alphabet	punct
17	alphabet	alphabet	NOUN	Number=Sing	15 word	appos
18	»	»	PUNCT	_	17 alphabet	punct
19	comes	come	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	3 borrowed	conj
20	from	from	ADP	_	24 letters	case
21	their	their	PRON	Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	24 letters	nmod:poss
22	first	first	ADJ	Degree=Pos NumForm=Word NumType=Ord	24 letters	amod
23	two	two	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	24 letters	nummod
24	letters	letter	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 comes	obl
25	,	,	PUNCT	_	26 alpha	punct
26	alpha	alpha	NOUN	Number=Sing	24 letters	appos
27	and	and	CCONJ	_	28 beta	cc
28	beta	beta	NOUN	Number=Sing	26 alpha	conj
29	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 borrowed	punct

Pragmatics

form: statement
act: assert
voice: narrator
polarity: none
teacher: kept the draft

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	borrow	past	the Greeks	the alphabet		ago property	vn obtain-13.5.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent alphabet=Theme
2	add speech: assert	past	the Greeks not said here	vowels			vn mix-22.1-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent vowel=Patient
3	come	present	the word		vowels's first two letters		vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V PP.initial_location»: agent=Theme from letter=Initial_Location
4	letter		vowels = vowel				nom letter «communication transitive»: poss=agent

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:17.

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): R5-strong ×1, R6-punct-agree ×1, R8-pos-agree ×1. 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/17/