Vord paradigm tool

[ReneZ]

This is both an interesting and a complicated subject.

In my personal opinion, the original description by Stolfi of the 3-part word structure with prefix-stem-postfix was the single major advance in our understanding of the text, even though this did not get us any closer to the solution. It explained, however, why essentially all previous translation attempts have failed, and it narrows down the search direction for the solution.

Whether the advanced grammer of Stolfi, or the various slot representations, or the network set up by Torsten is the preferable representation is for me a matter of taste. They all have their shortcomings. There are two more that one can imagine, namely the tree diagram from the start of the word (or backwards from the end of the word), or a character transition diagram. Both are mentioned in Torsten's post.

The tree diagram may be used as an example to show the main problem.
If one creates it, then it will quickly diverge in quite a wide tree.
Due to the fact that each of the three parts of the words have their own structure, what will happen is that the stem part will be replicated many times in this tree, under different word starts.

Wile the network has the advantage that it includes only valid words (i.e. only the valid words that we know), it will have a similar issue that certain frequent patterns can appear several times in the network.

I do like the slot system, but it still requires a lot of tuning before it can really help to understand the word structure.