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 name	values	examples
genders	masculine	domus magnus (big house)
	feminine	filia magna (big daughter)
	neuter	bellum magnum (big war)
numbers	singular	bellum magnum (a great war)
	plural	duo bella magna (two great wars)
cases (noun)	nominative	liber (book)
	genitive	titulus librī (the book's title)
	dative	librō
	accusative	Video librum. (I see the book.)
	ablative	Multa didici ex librō. (I learned a lot from the book.)
	vocative	liber
adjectives (noun)	before noun	magnus domus
	after noun (default)	domus magnus
verb tenses	present	is videt (he sees)
	past	is 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:

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	aqua	aquae
Genitive	aquae	aquārum
Dative	aquae	aquīs
Accusative	aquam	aquās
Ablative	aquā	aquīs
Vocative	aqua	aquae

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.

	cardinal	ordinal
text	novem dies (nine days)	nonus dies (the ninth day)
digit	9 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).