Morphological Analysis of Sahidic Coptic for Automatic Glossing

Abstract

We report on the implementation of a morphological analyzer for the Sahidic dialect of Coptic, a now extinct Afro-Asiatic language. The system is developed in the finite-state paradigm. The main purpose of the project is provide a method by which scholars and linguists can semi-automatically gloss extant texts written in Sahidic. Since a complete lexicon containing all attested forms in different manuscripts requires significant expertise in Coptic spanning almost 1,000 years, we have equipped the analyzer with a core lexicon and extended it with a "guesser" ability to capture out-of-vocabulary items in any inflection. We also suggest an ASCII transliteration for the language. A brief evaluation is provided.

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