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Amamorph

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Morphological Analysis

Morphology is the study of the way words are built up from smaller meaning bearing units i.e., morphemes. A morpheme is often defined as the minimal meaning-bearing unit in language. So, for example, the word fox consists of a single morpheme (the morpheme fox) while the word cats consists of the morpheme cat and the morpheme –s. As this example suggests, it is often useful to distinguish two broad classes of morphemes: stems and affixes. The exact details of the distinction vary from language to language, but intuitively, the stem is the “main” morpheme of the word, supplying the main meaning, while the affixes add “additional” meanings of various kinds.

Amharic Morphology

Amharic, like other Semitic languages such as Arabic, exhibits the root-pattern morphological phenomenon. This is especially true of Amharic verbs. Amharic verbs consist of stems and affixes. A stem again consists of root consonants (typically three) and vowel patterns.
The Amharic vocabulary is very large mainly as a result of the large number of morphological forms each words have. In Amharic morphology, each word can be expanded into a large number of forms. If we consider the case of verbs we notice that it has more than one thousand different forms (compare this with English which has just four derived forms for most of its verbs (e.g. smoke, smoking, smokes, smoked). Verbs, in Amharic can take many forms to indicate time (past, present, future, etc), gender (male, female), action (command, statement, invitation etc). The verbs also change forms depending on the gender of the subject and object. As a result of the Amharic morphological structure each word has a large number of derived forms, resulting in a very large vocabulary.
The analysis of the morphology of words is thus a difficult task, but if performed, will result in great leap in the advancement of Amharic language technology.

Eruxelf Amamorph

Eruxelf Amamorph is a program that is able to analyze and generate all the morphological forms of Amharic words. It can be used in the development of an Amharic text corpus, allow the development of speech synthesis and recognition and furthermore serves as a research environment for further studies.

Sample Amamorph Output

The following file is a sample output of the words generated using Amamorph.

Download a copy of the Amamorph Word Expander Sample pdf.