How to Establish a Verbal Paradigm on the Basis of Ancient Syriac Manuscripts

What it is about

The Turgama project at Leiden analyses the Syriac Peshitta, an ancient Aramaic Bible translation with a small corpus, no native speakers and many manuscript witnesses that differ in spelling. The author argues for encoding rather than tagging. A word is written as a formal string, marking the prefix, the lexeme, an unexpected letter, an expected but missing letter and the verbal ending. The grammatical values are derived later by a rule file (the "Word Grammar") and a lexicon, in an interactive loop where a human accepts or rejects proposals from an analytical lexicon that grows over time. The worked example is the perfect verb. Traditional grammars give the 3rd plural with a silent -w, but the manuscripts also attest a -w on the 3rd singular, and the paper records such forms with their witnesses instead of normalising them. The paper describes a workflow and a model; it gives no accuracy figures.

Ideas

• I1. Encode the attested forms, not only the grammatical paradigm: a marker for an absent paradigmatic letter, a marker for an unexpected letter, and a marker for the ending. For The verb and The weak verbs, the defective and plene spellings of weak verbs can be written in this way, so the tool sees the gap instead of a normalised form.
• I2. Keep the reason with the result: every grammatical value the rule file gives is traceable to a rule and a lexicon entry, and the paper's dump files show the trace. Mova's frames and world should keep the same trace so that each deduction can say why.
• I3. An index of orthographic variants per edition: the spelling categories with the forms that fall under each and their counts. A table of defective and plene variants like this would test the unpointed mode of tools/hbo and the OCR correction in tools/ocrfix on realistic variation.

For Mova

I1 goes into The verb and The weak verbs, and the same encoding is a candidate for The verb in Biblical Aramaic (Syriac is an Aramaic variety). I2 goes into the prag and world traces. I3 goes into tools/hbo and tools/ocrfix.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{wido2009how,
  title = {{How to Establish a Verbal Paradigm on the Basis of Ancient Syriac Manuscripts}},
  author = {Wido, van Peursen,},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W09-0801/}
}

References

19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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14. Peursen, W.Th. van. 2007. Language and Interpretation in the Syriac Text of Ben Sira. A Comparative Linguistic and Literary Study. Monographs of the Peshitta Institute Leiden 16. Leiden: Brill. ↗
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