Inline Annotation of Sandhi

In many Greek morphology projects, I’ve wanted a way of conveying the surface form of an inflected word while also conveying the underlying components prior to the application of the sandhi rule. A couple of years ago, I came up with a simple representation for inline annotation.

Say you want to convey the fact that φιλοῦμεν comes from φιλε + ομεν by application of the rule that ε + ο → ου. In the representation I’ve been using you’d write φιλ|ε>ου<ο|μεν.

This enables you to see the stem and affix easily but also the result of sandhi.

So what A|B>C<D|E means is there is a sandhi rule that B + D → C and that rule has been applied in AB + DE to form ACE.

Using Stump’s terminology introduced in a previous post:

A / φιλ is the theme
CE / ουμεν is the distinguisher
AB / φιλε is the stem
DE / ομεν is the affix

It also means that you can search for |B>C<D| to find where that particular sandhi rule has been applied.

at the intersection of computing, linguistics, philology, and learning science

By day I’m an entrepreneur, web technologist and open-source developer but my academic background is in linguistics (along with some classics, comparative philology, and educational statistics) and my main avocation is working on text, annotations, analysis and software relating to historical languages with a particular interest in facilitating better learning.

While my focus has mostly been on Biblical Greek, much of the work is highly relevant to other Hellenistic Greek texts, other dialects of Ancient Greek and, indeed, texts in completely different languages as well.

All code written for this endeavour is open source and text and data is made available under a Creative Commons license to the extent allowed by the sources used.