How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 18
The Romans took the alphabet from the Greeks and the Etruscans; English uses their Latin alphabet, and the Cyrillic alphabet of Ukrainian grew from the Greek one about 1,100 years ago.
Who acts: Romans, English, Cyrillic alphabet · What happens: take, use, grow · To what, where: alphabet, Greeks, Latin alphabet
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 (Romans, English, Cyrillic alphabet), 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 Romans | det |
| 2 | Romans | Roman | PROPN | Number=Plur | 3 took | nsubj |
| 3 | took | take | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 4 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 alphabet | det |
| 5 | alphabet | alphabet | NOUN | Number=Sing | 3 took | obj |
| 6 | from | from | ADP | _ | 8 Greeks | case |
| 7 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 Greeks | det |
| 8 | Greeks | Greek | PROPN | Number=Plur | 3 took | obl |
| 9 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 11 Etruscans | cc |
| 10 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 11 Etruscans | det |
| 11 | Etruscans | Etruscan | PROPN | Number=Plur | 8 Greeks | conj |
| 12 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 14 uses | punct |
| 13 | English | English | PROPN | Number=Sing | 14 uses | nsubj |
| 14 | uses | use | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 3 took | parataxis |
| 15 | their | their | PRON | Case=Gen Number=Plur Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 17 alphabet | nmod:poss |
| 16 | Latin | Latin | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 17 alphabet | amod |
| 17 | alphabet | alphabet | NOUN | Number=Sing | 14 uses | obj |
| 18 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 25 grew | punct |
| 19 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 25 grew | cc |
| 20 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 22 alphabet | det |
| 21 | Cyrillic | cyrillic | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 22 alphabet | amod |
| 22 | alphabet | alphabet | NOUN | Number=Sing | 25 grew | nsubj |
| 23 | of | of | ADP | _ | 24 Ukrainian | case |
| 24 | Ukrainian | Ukrainian | PROPN | Number=Sing | 22 alphabet | nmod |
| 25 | grew | grow | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 3 took | conj |
| 26 | from | from | ADP | _ | 29 one | case |
| 27 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 29 one | det |
| 28 | Greek | Greek | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 29 one | amod |
| 29 | one | one | NOUN | Number=Sing | 25 grew | obl |
| 30 | about | about | ADV | _ | 31 1,100 | advmod |
| 31 | 1,100 | 1,100 | NUM | NumForm=Digit NumType=Card | 32 years | nummod |
| 32 | years | year | NOUN | Number=Plur | 33 ago | obl:unmarked |
| 33 | ago | ago | ADV | _ | 25 grew | advmod |
| 34 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 3 took | punct |
Pragmatics
- form
- statement
- act
- assert
- voice
- narrator
- polarity
- none
- teacher
- kept the draft
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | take | past | the Romans | the alphabet | the Greeks and the Etruscans | vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP PP.initial_location»: agent=Agent alphabet=Theme from greek=Initial_Location | |||
| 2 | use | present | English | Greeks's Latin alphabet | vn eat-39.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent alphabet=Patient | ||||
| 3 | grow | past | the Cyrillic alphabet of Ukrainian | from the Greek one; ago property | vn grow-26.2.1 «NP.product V PP.patient»: agent=Product from one=Patient |
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:18.
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 ×3, R7-rel-agree ×1, R8-pos-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/18/