Rune : A computer program for interpretation of rune stones

The language on Swedish rune stones written in the 16 character alphabet (futhark) constitutes a very special fragment of the Swedish of its time (about 800-1100). Because of the ritual character of the inscriptions the language is rather standardized. The greatest variation is in proper names. As has long been noted the typical formula is (in English translation): N raised this stone after M his P, where N and M are personal names and P is a kinship term. Additional sentences may state where the person died, e.g. He fell in Greece. Depending on the success of the new religion the formula God help his soul is sometimes also added (for safety). There are about 3000 rune stones with text of this type. The purpose of this paper is to describe a computer program which is able to interpret such typical rune stone texts and translate them into Modern Swedish. In a first step the runes are transliterated into Latin letters. The second step is the parsing of the transliterated text resulting in a functionalsemantic representation showing the analysis in terms of subject, predicate, objects and adverbials functional roles) in addition to word meanings according to Swetra grammar. In a third step this functional representation is then used as an intermediate language (interlingua) in an automatic translation into Modern Swedish. The program may also be run in the other direction translating Modern Swedish into runes. Some stones are offered for demonstration

Permutational Grammar for free word order languages

Permutational Grammar, PG, is a grammar inspired by the Free Word Order grammar, FOG, presented in Vladimir Pericliev & Alexander Grigorov 1992. Some languages, notably Latin, are said to have free word order, see e.g. Siewierska 1988. The name Permutational Grammar is derived from the use of permutations in order to generate order variation. The general problem to be solved by FOG and PG is the generation and analysis of a great number of word order variants with (roughly) the same meaning. PG accomplishes this by specifying some basic phrase structure orders with their functional (and semantic) representations, and then permuting the corresponding sequences of constituents to obtain all the other sequences with the same meaning. Permutational Grammar can be regarded as a generative phrase structure grammar with transformations represented by permutations. It is developed from SWETRA grammar (see Sigurd 1994). The constituent parsing trees are not represented explicitly. PG is written with generative rewrite rules and implemented in Prolog via the Definite Clause Grammar (DCG) formalism. The Prolog implementation used here is LPAProlog. The rules state that permutations of the constituents to the right of the rewrite symbol have the functional representation given as an argument to the left of the rewrite symbol. These rewrite rules can be compiled into rules that generate all possible permutations of the basic word order ‘on the fly’. It is possible to apply constraints to the permutations generated. One may, for example, introduce an order constraint like imbefore(C1,C2,M), which states that a constituent matching the description C1 must occur immediately before another constituent matching C2 in the list of constituents M. Another example is last(C,M), which states that a C must occur last in the list

Svenska Akademiens ordbok har passerat S!

A new volume (nr 33) of the Dictionary of the Swedish Academy has been published. The dictionary is known for its long time of publication - it was started in 1892 and has just reached the letter T - and the review article gives a survey of the history of this unique project and comments on the latest volume. It is observed that the articles keep to the standards of the previous volumes and that it is hard to find any missing words, missing meanings or mistakes. The future of the dictionary has recently been discussed because of financial and editorial problems. It is difficult to find and keep an expert staff of editors these days. The Swedish Academy has now decided that the dictionary is to be finished by 2017

Kielenhuollon ja kielentutkimuksen uusia tehtäviä

Kielenaineksetalennus (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 306)löytö, -hinta (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 306)moduli (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 309)säilytysyksikkö (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 309)vierailufunktio (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 309)ystävällinen (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 306

A New Analysis for Machine Translation of Auxiliaries and Main verb Complexes

The analysis of the verb phrase poses interesting problems. This paper suggests a binary solution where the auxiliary is treated as one constituent and the main verb complex as another. Auxiliaries are thus not treated as main verbs as was suggested by Ross 1967 (and followed in the first version of Referent Grammar, Sigurd 1987). The auxiliary may be lacking (latent, empty), in which case the main verb carries the tense (finite) marker, or the auxiliary may be present, in which case the auxiliary carries the tense marker, while the main verb complex must be nonfinite. In the main verb complex, the main verb may be preceded by almost any number of nonfinite auxiliaries, and it is this possibility which creates theoretically interesting chains of nonfinite verb forms such as Swedish Eva måste ha velat kunna våga (att) hoppa (Eva must have wanted to be able to dare (to) jump). A basic idea of this paper is that the nonfinite auxiliary verb forms can be added as prefixes (or as in G man suffixes) by a kind of morphological rule