How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 3

True writing began about 5,200 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt, when temple workers and traders needed to remember how much grain, beer and how many sheep they had.

Who acts: True writing, temple workers, workers · What happens: begin, need, remember, have · To what, where: Mesopotamia, much grain, many sheep

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 (True writing, temple workers, workers), 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	True	true	ADJ	Degree=Pos	2 writing	amod
2	writing	writing	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 began	nsubj
3	began	begin	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	about	about	ADV	_	5 5,200	advmod
5	5,200	5,200	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	6 years	nummod
6	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	7 ago	obl:unmarked
7	ago	ago	ADV	_	3 began	advmod
8	in	in	ADP	_	9 Mesopotamia	case
9	Mesopotamia	Mesopotamia	PROPN	Number=Sing	3 began	obl
10	and	and	CCONJ	_	11 Egypt	cc
11	Egypt	Egypt	PROPN	Number=Sing	9 Mesopotamia	conj
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	18 needed	punct
13	when	when	SCONJ	_	18 needed	mark
14	temple	temple	NOUN	Number=Sing	15 workers	compound
15	workers	worker	NOUN	Number=Plur	18 needed	nsubj
16	and	and	CCONJ	_	17 traders	cc
17	traders	trader	NOUN	Number=Plur	15 workers	conj
18	needed	need	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	3 began	advcl
19	to	to	PART	_	20 remember	mark
20	remember	remember	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	18 needed	xcomp
21	how	how	ADV	PronType=Int	22 much	advmod
22	much	much	ADJ	Degree=Pos	23 grain	amod
23	grain	grain	NOUN	Number=Sing	20 remember	obj
24	,	,	PUNCT	_	25 beer	punct
25	beer	beer	NOUN	Number=Sing	23 grain	conj
26	and	and	CCONJ	_	29 sheep	cc
27	how	how	ADV	PronType=Int	28 many	advmod
28	many	many	ADJ	Degree=Pos	29 sheep	amod
29	sheep	sheep	NOUN	Number=Plur	23 grain	conj
30	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	31 had	nsubj
31	had	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	29 sheep	acl:relcl
32	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 began	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	begin	past	True writing		Mesopotamia and Egypt	ago property	vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality
2	need	past	temple workers and traders				vn want-32.1-1-1 «NP V NP S_INF»: agent=Pivot clause=Theme
3	remember not said to happen	to-infinitive	temple workers and traders not said here	much grain and beer and many sheep			vn characterize-29.2-1-1 «NP V NP S_ING»: agent=Agent grain=Theme
4	have	past	workers = worker	many sheep not said here			vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent sheep=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:3.

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): R1-cc-next ×3, R5-strong ×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/3/