De-Inflection Software?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Sep 20 23:55:45 EDT 2002


Forwarded for George Somsel <Polycarp66 at aol.com>:

>In a message dated 9/20/2002 6:31:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>rstauch at charter.net writes:
>
>>I wonder if anyone has ever seen software written to take a word in
>>Greek and examine it for its constituent parts, prefix-stem-suffix? Is
>>there any such software written? I don't remember ever seeing anything
>>like that, but I might not be looking in the right places.
>>
>>I think it might be relatively easy to write such software. It would be
>>a matter of determining what tables to include and how to modify words
>>given to find the possibilities. Debugging might take a lot of time,
>>though.
>>
>>Would there be much of a market for such software? It could go both
>>ways, and allow one to enter a stem, for which it would produce an
>>inflection table, or one could enter a word found in a certain text and
>>it would tell you the part of speech, its inflectional form, and other
>>facts (like, if it is a verb form of a noun, a compound word, and all
>>that).
>>
>>I can imagine such software for other languages, too. It could use the
>>same basic engine, but with different rules, tables and fonts.
>>
>>Frankly, I am tired of looking up words, not knowing if I have an adverb
>>or verb in hand, wasting time finding out it's not at all what I thought
>>it was. Of course, by the time I would be through writing such software,
>>I wouldn't have that problem any more. ;)
>>
>
>I'm reminded of an old TV add for Smith-Barney by John Houseman.  "We make
>money the old fashioned way.  We earn it."  I would suggest that the best
>way would be "We do Greek the old fashioned way.  We learn it."
>
>gfsomsel





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