Characteristics of the Latin language in AX Semantics

Fundamentals

In Latin, you need to know the gender of the noun in order to form the accompanying determiners, adjectives, and numerals correctly.

Latin has three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine and neuter. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Latin has 6 cases for nouns.

grammatical namevaluesexamples
gendersmasculinedomus magnus (big house)
femininefilia magna (big daughter)
neuterbellum magnum (big war)
numberssingularbellum magnum (a great war)
pluralduo bella magna (two great wars)
cases (noun)nominativeliber (book)
genitivetitulus librī
(the book's title)
dativelibrō
accusativeVideo librum.
(I see the book.)
ablativeMulta didici ex librō.
(I learned a lot from the book.)
vocativeliber
adjectives (noun)before nounmagnus domus
after noun (default)domus magnus
verb tensespresentis videt (he sees)
pastis vidit (he saw)

The standard order of a noun phrase in Latin is the following: preposition + determiner + numeral + noun + adjective.

See for example:

de     his    tribus  libris     popularibus
about  these  three   books[pl]  popular
PREP   DET    NUM     NOUN       ADJ
"about these three popular books"

Lexicon

Nouns

For Latin nouns, the LEXICON needs to encode gender, case, and determiner changes. The plural forms should be added to the lexicon if they are not regular.

Examples

The basic lexicon entry for aqua (water) contains:

  • gender: f
  • inflection table for case and number:
SingularPlural
Nominativeaquaaquae
Genitiveaquaeaquārum
Dativeaquaeaquīs
Accusativeaquamaquās
Ablativeaquāaquīs
Vocativeaquaaquae

Adjectives

In the lexicon, the inflection table for gender, case, and number can be encoded. For adjective position, the default is "after noun".

Verbs

The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects the wrong way, you should add it to the lexicon.

Container settings

Determiner

The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Latin: demonstrative, distal, medial, relative and possessive.

Numerals

The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.

cardinalordinal
textnovem dies
(nine days)
nonus dies
(the ninth day)
digit9 dies
(9 days)
9. dies
(the 9th day)

For Latin, ordinal numerals are written out until 10, otherwise (above 10) the output is in digit form. Cardinal numerals are written out until 20, otherwise (above 20) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:

viginti cars
(twenty cars)
21 cars
(21 cars)

Preposition switch

On the AX NLG platform the settings for the container Iaponiam (Japan) are: preposition="in" and case="accusative".

Ex Germania in Iaponiam volant.
(They are flying from Germany to Japan.)

For the below sentence but with a different country (i.e. the United States), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="in"and case="accusative"), but the lexical information changes the result:

Ex Germania ad Civitates Foederatas volant.
(They fly from Germany to the United States.)

The second example shows preposition switch from in to ad for Civitates Foederatas (the United States).