Re: Intermediate forms

Dear Cristiano,
Either ontolex:Form is always an attested form, or there is enough leeway
to allow for unattested/hypothetical forms; afaik, this is underspecified
in the W3C report (although I'm happy to be corrected...), so it's really a
case of being pragmatic. In the latter case, both *patrem and *patre could
be listed as individuals of type ontolex:Form and the asterisk (in the
written form) would mark them out as both being (alternative) hypotheses,
or you could create a subclass of Form called something like UnattestedForm
for these cases. After all, a hypothetical form is still a kind of form:
just like a hypothetical missing link between two animals for which we have
fossil evidence would still be an animal.  As Gilles points out, it's not
just forms, but Lexical Entries can also be unattested, and whole
(proto)languages made up of reconstructions.
Cheers,
Fahad
Il giorno dom 24 nov 2024 alle ore 11:48 Cristiano Longo <
cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org> ha scritto:

> 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.
>>
>>
>>