isido / functional-morphology-for-koine-greek

Functional Morphology for Koine Greek
=====================================

Introduction
------------

This is a program attempting to provide morphology for Koine Greek. It
is based on Functional Morphology by Markus Forsberg and Aarne Ranta
[1]. The original FM package implemented Latin morphology, this Greek
package is based on the Latin definitions and some of the old Latin
code still exists in files. The old code will gradually disappear, as
the Greek support becomes more complete.


Building and running
--------------------

To build the project, type 'make' in the project directory. You will
need C development environment (GCC) and Glasgow Haskell Compiler
(GHC). This will produce a binary 'morpho_greek' that is the actual
morphological analyzer.

Program depends on haskell-network -library. If using Ubuntu or Debian,
you can install necessary dependencies with

     $ sudo apt-get install ghc6 libghc6-networking-dev build-essential

Building under Windows should also be possible, you will probably just
need to recreate build script that works in your environment.

When you have successfully compiled the program, type

     $ morpho_greek -h

for a list of command line options. A very small dictionary is
provided.

To actually run the program with sample dictionary, type

     $ morpho_greek greek.lexicon

Now you can type words that are in dictionary -- in Greek (your
terminal must be able to input Greek!). If the program recognizes
word, it will output morphological analysis for the word.

Status and Todo
---------------

Currently, the morphological analysis is very much incomplete. Support
is most complete for nouns, there is some incomplete support for
verbal paradigms.

*Note:* the program does not understand accents! Breathing marks also
cause problems so they are not consistently in use. Iota subscriptum,
on the other hand, is relevant!

Even though the targetted Greek dialect is Koine Greek, I've used
"Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek" by James Morwood (Oxford
University Press 2001) as the basis for definitions and grammatical
categories. This might change in future, if I find a handy and
trustworthy grammar for Koine dialect.

The long term goal is to have a complete morphological analyzer for
Koine Greek. Another goal is to create some sort of educational
software to help students learn all the myriad paradigms of ancient
Greek language (if any of my students are reading this, prepare to
become guinea pigs...).

Overall plan of action is as follows:

 1) Implement support for nouns
 2) Implement support for regular verbs (including augmentation)
 3) Implement support for non-regular verbs
 4) Implement support for accentuation and breathing marks

Authors
-------

Functional Morphology framework was written by Markus Forsberg and
Aarne Ranta. The Greek implementation is by Ilja Sidoroff
(ilja.sidoroff  @  iki.fi). It is licensed by terms of GNU General
Public License.



[1] http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~markus/FM/