Re: Intermediate forms

Thank you Gilles, I'm very convinced that this discussion is not 
restricted to historical lingustics. I identified some peculiarities of 
these intermediate forms which distinguish them from ontolex forms:

- they are not bounded to any lexical entry (or, at least, to one 
belonging to an hypothetical language)

- they must have almost one written representation and

- almost one associated phonetic representation.

CL

On 25/11/24 10:16, Gilles Sérasset wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Very interesting discussion.
>
> I am not a specialist in any way, hence maybe a naive question, but in 
> which way are such hypothetical forms related to lexical entries in 
> reconstructed language ?
>
> They may be of different nature, but share the “hypothetical” feature, 
> hence are there any similarities that could be used to treat them 
> similarly.
>
> It also remind me of non lexicalized forms in derivational morphology 
> when 2 derivations are used to model the derivation process, eg. Verb 
> -> adj -> adv where the adjective form is not lexicalized and never 
> attested. In the process modelling it is often “computed” and 
> represented (with a star prefix).
>
> Maybe these could inspire a similar modelling.
>
> Regards,
>
> Gilles,
>
>> On 24 Nov 2024, at 11:46, Cristiano Longo 
>> <cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>