Assignment 6: Esperanto nouns and adjectives

Starting with the lexicon for Esperanto nouns that you already have (Assignment 5), the task here is to augment it with adjectives and some new types of nouns.

Your grammar should now start like this:

! Esperanto lexicon Multichar_Symbols +Acc ! accusative +Adj ! adjective +ASuff ! adjective suffix +Aug ! augmentative +Dim ! diminutive +Fem ! feminine MF+ ! male-female Op+ ! opposite Neg+ ! negative +Noun ! noun +NSuff ! noun suffix +Pl ! plural j +Sg ! singular

LEXICON Root Adjectives ; Nouns ;

First Facts

Esperanto adjectives can begin optionally with onr of the following prefixes:
Every adjective must contain a root, and an adjective can begin with the root.
A root like long is not a valid word by itself. A prefix by itself is not a valid word, and neither is a prefix plus root.
All Esperanto adjectives must have an a suffix, e.g. bona and grava, which are valid words.
Like nouns, adjectives can be optionally marked as augmentative or diminutive:
As with nouns, the eg or et must come after the root but before the a ending. The augmentative and diminutive co-occur, and it is not clear if there are any rules to limit their mutual order or co-occurrence. For this exercise, allow any number of these suffixes to appear inside an adjective.
Unlike nouns like hundo/hundino, adjectives cannot be marked feminine with the in suffix.
To mark an adjective as plural, add the j suffix, which, if present, must appear immediately after the a suffix. E.g. longaj. Adjectives not overtly marked as plural are singular.
To mark an adjective as accusative, the n suffix appears just after the j plural suffix (if present) or else just after the o suffix (which is always present).

First Task

Augment your Esperanto lexicon for nouns with adjectives taking into account the above simplified facts. Put your grammar in a file named something like esperanto2.lexc, compile and test it with the same methods as in Assignment 5.

The lexicon should include the following strings:

bona bonaj bonajn junetaj malbonetajn nealtaj gravegeta

The lexicon should not include strings such as:

mal bon bonja boneg gravaeg altanj

Now go back into your source file and add the following new adjective roots:

`ideal`	`("ideal")`
`luks`	`("luxurious")`
`blank`	`("white")`
`nigr`	`("black")`
`liber`	`("free")`
`evident`	`("obvious")`
`grandioz`	`("sublime"/"magnificent")`
`oportun`	`("convenient")`

More Facts

It is now time to introduce a bit of Esperanto derivational morphology.

In Esperanto, noun roots, and noun roots concatenated with augmentative, diminutive and feminine suffixes, can continue to take adjective suffixes, as in hunda (``canine''), hundina (``bitchlike''), elefantega (``big-elephantine''), etc. Fix your grammar to handle such words.
Esperanto noun roots denoting higher animals with masculine and feminine sexes can take the ge prefix denoting ``male and female''. Fix your grammar to accept words such as gehundoj (``male and female dogs''), geelefantegoj (``male and female big elephants''), and gekatetoj (``male and female kittens''). (Do not worry about overgeneration at this stage. In reality, when ge is present, the plural suffix j is perhaps required and the in feminine suffix is forbidden. We'll fix this overgeneration in later exercises.)
Adjectives can be nominalized with the ec suffix, which then continues on to take nominal suffixes, e.g. boneco (``goodness''), alteco (``height''), juneco (``youth''), malbonegecon (``extreme evil[ACC]''), etc.

Test your enhanced grammar. It should accept

hundo hundino hundetoj hundeginojn gehundoj hunda hundaj hundinajn bona bonaj bonan boneco bonecojn malbona malbonecoj malbonega neboneco elefanto elefantinojn geelefantoj elefanta elefantaj elefantajn

Your grammar should reject

bon elefant alt bono geelefant hundeco gealtaj

In fact, our grammar is still far from complete, and some of the rejected words, especially hundeco, may in fact be valid words of the real Esperanto language. Your challenge as a linguist is to try to make your formal language, described in your lexc grammar, as much like the target language as possible, minimizing both undergeneration and overgeneration.

`ne`	(negation of the root)
`mal`	(opposite of the root)

`bon`	`("good")`
`long`	`("long")`
`alt`	`("tall/high")`
`grav`	`("important")`
`jun`	`("young")`

`eg`	augmentative
`et`	diminutive