Historical Outlines of English Accidence

What it is about

The book describes the history of English word forms: how nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs and adverbs got their inflections, and how new words are formed. The text is the 1895 revision by Kellner and Bradley. The revisers say what changed: the confusion of sounds with letters was removed, Grimm's Law was corrected, Verner's Law was added, and the theory of vowel gradation was explained. That last change altered the chapter on strong verbs in essential points. The chapters follow the Teutonic and Old English background, then Etymology, Substantives, Adjectives, Pronouns, Verbs (chapter XIV), Adverbs, and Derivation and Word Formation (chapter XIX). The method is philological and qualitative: the forms are explained by sound laws, with examples from the older languages. No counts are given in the sections I read.

Ideas

• I1. In en/src/morph.rs, add a table of strong verb classes by vowel gradation (the ablaut series). Each entry gets its class and a flag for Verner's alternation, so that the singular and plural preterite of "seethe" and "become" are explained by a rule, not a list.
• I2. Derive a test from chapter XIV: for each irregular verb in the paper, check the lemmatiser's output on its past singular and past plural. Report the error rate per class, to see which class the rules fail on.
• I3. Use chapter XIX as a list of affix patterns with their origin, and check that morph::archaic and the derivation rules in en/src/morph.rs agree on them. Keep the list as a closed table with BTreeMap order.

For Mova

The chapters are 13. Verbs, 14. Irregular verbs and 17. Derivation II: suffixes, with 16. Derivation I: prefixes for prefixes. The code is en/src/morph.rs (lemmatiser and inflection) and en/src/udreg.rs for the feature names. The measure: lemma and feature accuracy on the irregular verb list, split by ablaut class, run twice to confirm it is identical.

Cite

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

@book{morris1872historical,
  title = {{Historical Outlines of English Accidence}},
  author = {Morris, Richard and Kellner, Leon and Bradley, Henry},
  year = {1872},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/historicaloutli01morrgoog}
}

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