Amharic Lingua Wiki

This website is intended to provide a collaborative environment in which people working on Amharic language processing can exchange ideas and resources relating to the Language. Though the emphasis is on Amharic language, people working in other Ethiopian or foreign languages are also welcomed to contribute.

Amharic belongs to the Semitic family of languages and is one of the most widely spoken languages in Ethiopia. It has its own script that is borrowed from Ge’ez, another Ethiopian Semitic language. The script is believed to have originated from the South Sabean script. It is a syllabary writing system where each character represents an open CV syllable, i.e., a combination of a consonant followed by a vowel. Amharic has a complex morphology. Word formation involves prefixation, suffixation, infixation, reduplication, and Semitic stem interdigitation, among others. Like other Semitic languages, e.g., Arabic, Amharic verbs and their derivations constitute a significant part of the lexicon. In Semitic languages, words, especially verbs, are best viewed as consisting of discontinuous morphemes that are combined in a non-concatenative manner. Put differently, verbs are commonly analyzed as consisting of root consonants, template patterns, and vowel patterns. With the exception of very few verb forms (such as the imperative), all derived verb forms take affixes in order to appear as independent words.

Current research in Amharic Natural Language Processing covers different aspects of the language which ranges from morphological Analysis (Nega, 1999; Abyot, 2000; Mesfin, 2002), syntax (Atelach, 2002; Sisay, 2004), speech recognition (Solomon, 2005), just to mention a few. These researches mainly focus on lower level natural language processing such as POS tagging and morphological analysis. Though morphological analysis is often considered as the first phase of a more complex natural language processing application, significant research needs to be done in other areas as syntax, semantic and discourse in order to make the development of viable NLP applications possible.

comments:

books --mobilemoor, Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:04:28 -0500 reply
assalam aalakum i am trying to find a couple of books by tekle mariam haile "LeMalau? Alam Yakanabe yafidal GasaBarakat?"; Asras yanesaw "Yakam Matesabia"; D.A. Musolo "Africian Philosopy in Search of Identity"; E.A.W. Budge "The life and exp;pots pf a;examder tje Great"; HENOK: Journal of Historicial and Philosophical Thought, Vol. 1, Mosene Yefre; Elleni Tedla, Sankofa: Africian Thought and Education; Wosene Yefru "The Ancient Ethiopian History of Philosopy" Hailu Habtu, "Preliminary notes on Ancient ethiopian History" city college; V.Y. Mudimbe "The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge"; Isidore Okpewho "any" please send an email with information. HOTEP!