This repository contains some basic NLP resources for the Chichewa
language. Currently, all that's here is a basic lexicon
(in the folder lexicon) and a simple script for doing
morphological generation of verb forms: scripts/gen.pl.
Also potentially useful is the makefile in the lexicon directory,
which was a quick and dirty attempt to generate a very large
Chichewa word list as part of another project.
These scripts were written by @kscanne, with linguistic advice from @ceekays.
There are better ways of doing all of this. A proper morphological transducer would allow generation and analysis and would be much faster as well.
The lexicon files are organized by part of speech.
A file named nA-B.txt should contain nouns from class A
whose plurals are in class B. If B==x, then the noun
has no plural form.
The script gen.pl is designed to work in a pipeline. It reads
in lines that look like this:
NM+SM+TM+OM^kangaz^AM
and outputs all possible surface forms with the given root:
akangaza (++a1++^kangaz^a+)
achikangaza (++a1++chi^kangaz^a+)
aikangaza (++a1++i^kangaz^a+)
akakangaza (++a1++ka^kangaz^a+)
alikangaza (++a1++li^kangaz^a+)
amukangaza (++a1++mu^kangaz^a+)
...
The morphological elements NM,SM,TM, etc. are documented in the script. Look at the various makefile targets to see how it's used in practice.