Latin inflection:

Question

I don't know if anyone here is able to speak (or write) the "dead language" Latin. But maybe you can even help me without knowing this language ...

I have a database of words (including nouns and verbs). Now I would like to generate all the different (inflected) forms of those nouns and verbs. What would be the best strategy to do this?

As Latin is a highly inflected language, there is:

a) the declension of nouns

b) the conjugation of verbs

See this translated page for an example of a verb's conjugation ("mandare"): conjugation

I don't want to type in all those forms for all the words manually. So how can I generate them automatically? What is the best approach?

• a list of complex rules how to inflect all the words
• Bayesian methods
• ...

Thank you very much in advance!

Edit (possible solution?):

I found out now that there's a program called "William Whitaker's Words". It creates inflections for latin words as well, so it's exactly doing what I want to do.

Wikipedia says that the program works like this: "Words uses a set of rules based on natural pre-, in-, and suffixation, declension, and conjugation to determine the possibility of an entry. As a consequence of this approach of analysing the structure of words, there is no guarantee that these words were ever used in Latin literature or speech, even if the program finds a possible meaning to a given word."

The program's source is also available here. But I don't really understand how this is to work. Can you help me? Maybe this would be the solution to my question ...

Answer 1

You could do something similar to hunspell dictionary format (see http://www.manpagez.com/man/4/hunspell/)

You define 2 tables. One contains roots of the words (the part that never change), and the other contains modifications for a given class. For a given class, for each declension (or conjugation), it tells what characters to add at the end (or the beginning) of the root. It even can specify to replace a given number of characters. Now, to get a word at a specific declension, you take the root, apply the transformation from the class it belongs, and voilà!

For example, for mandare, the root would be mand, and the class would contains suffixes like o, as, ate, amous, atis... for active indicative present.

Answer 2

Perhaps this would help