Formalizing the Ancient Greek Participle Inflection with NooJ

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary formalization of the Ancient Greek participle using the (Modern) Greek NooJ Module [2]. To ensure its morphological processing, we first retrieved the secondary operators of the properties.def file of the (Modern) Greek NooJ Module from the doctoral thesis of Lena Papadopoulou. However, we added four definitions related to the Ancient Greek participle: V_Mood = PAR (participle), and the three other tenses—the PR (present) tense is included in the module—in which the participle was conjugated in Ancient Greek: FU (future), AO (aorist), and PF (perfect). The set of conjugational and declensional properties comprises: V_Mood = PAR; PAR_Case = nom | acc | gen | voc | dat; PAR_Gender = n | f | m; PAR_Number = s | p; PAR_Tense = PR | FU | AO | PF; PAR_Voice = act | mid | pas | mp. Our text corpus is made up of 150 animal fables written in prose by or associated with Aesop, a Greek fabulist and storyteller, who was born around 620 BCE. His fables contain a great variety of participles in their full forms, without final vowel elisions. We offer a brief account of the stages involved in the morphological processing and show we have been able to inflect, generate and recognize present active and middle-passive participles; future active, middle and passive participles; and aorist active, middle and passive participles.