Computer-assisted morphological analysis of ancient Greek

Abstract

This system for automated morphological analysis of ancient Greek had its origin in a practical need rather than a theoretical concern for natural language parsing. Our immediate goal was to develop a new textbook and curriculum for teaching ancient Greek to American university students. Most traditional methods assume that a student is willing to spend at least one year in the study of grammar before reading any significant quantity of literature. Our conviction is that students can begin reading literature very early in the first year if the initial grammatical instruction is focused on those features of the language which actually occur in the texts first read. To test this theory, we have used the computer to help produce a complete lexical and grammatical analysis of 40,000 words of ancient Greek selected from texts which students might wish to read in their first year. We have concentrated our attention initially on morphological analysis since the complexity of Greek morphology is the major obstacle to learning the language. We have prepared statistical summaries of the morphology of each text, as well as complete concordances organized both according to dictionary lemma and morphological category. Although our first goal is to collect information for a textbook, it is obvious that an automated system for morphological analysis will have uses far beyond the teaching of elementary Greek.