Re: Intermediate forms

Dear Fahad Khan, thanks for your observations which deserve careful 
considerations. In the meanwhile,

at first glance, I observe that of course etymologies (in the sense of 
lemonEty) are just hypotheses,

but stating that a lexical expression is a ontolex:Form is an assertion 
with a precise meaning. In other words, etymologies are hypothetical 
derivations grounded on well attested lexical expression in some 
language.  Instead, our case is quite different as our intermediate 
forms are properly hypotetical. This is clarified by observing that a 
source expression (which of course is a form) can be turned into the 
corresponding one in the recipient language through more than one 
derivation.

In the example we have two derivations from patrem to padre:

patrem -> padrem -> padre, and

patrem -> patre -> padre.

For these reason, I think that asserting that "padrem" or "patre" was 
lexical expression of some intermediate language is quite hazardous.

CL

On 22/11/24 17:22, Fahad Khan wrote:
> Dear Cristiano,
> As far as I'm aware an intermediate form is an unattested form that is 
> hypothesized by linguists on the basis of (usually well-attested) 
> linguistic rules; as such it is usually prefixed with an asterisk 
> (e.g., /*patrem/). But the hypothesis *is* that it was used by 
> speakers at a certain point in the evolution of a word, and therefore 
> did belong to a certain historical stage of a language. In which case, 
> I don't understand why you couldn't use Form, or at least create a 
> subclass of Form for asterisked forms?
> Cheers
> Fahad
>
> Il giorno mer 20 nov 2024 alle ore 12:49 Cristiano Longo 
> <cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org> ha scritto:
>
>     Good morning all. In my last work I faced with strings that, in my
>     opinion, cannot be modelled using ontolex:Form, as they are just
>     "intermediate forms" which does not belong to any language.
>
>     An example is reported in Figure 2 at
>     https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3809/paper2.pdf. Here the latin word "patrem"
>     changes to an intermediate form "padrem" through lenition, and
>     finally
>     becomes the italian word "padre".
>
>     However, the notion of intermediate forms was previously
>     introduced in
>     the areas concerning phonology and morfology, as reported in [1].
>
>     To deal with such intermediate forms I introduced a new superclass of
>     ontolex:Form (i.e., LanguageObject). However, I'm not really sure
>     that
>     this design choice is correct. Of course, intermediate forms are
>     not morphs.
>
>     I wonder if there are other works where these kind of strings have
>     been
>     modelled in OWL.
>
>     Any suggestion and hint is wellcome,
>
>     thanks in advance,
>
>     CL
>
>     [1] A. Hurskainen, K. Koskenniemi, T. Pirinen, L. Antonsen, E.
>     Axelson,
>     E. Bick, B. Gaup, S. Hardwick,
>     K. Hiovain, F. Karlsson, K. Lindén, I. Listenmaa, I. Mikkelsen, S.
>     Moshagen, A. Ranta, J. Rueter,
>     D. Swanson, T. Trosterud, L. Wiechetek, Rule-Based Language
>     Technology,
>     2023.
>
>