Description:
This paper aims at presenting how to elaborate a relevant sorting of
morphosyntactic tags to be used in the NooJ dictionary for Rromani language
through three topics: dialectal issues, treatment of postpositions and countableness of substantives. This module encompasses all four dialects of Rromani,
the isoglosses of which are basically no longer geographical. We have thus
defined each of the four dialects through a combination of two tags corresponding to specific isoglosses. For instance, the so-called O-bi dialect (i.e.
O-superdialect with no mutation of alveolar affricates) is labelled as “rro + rrbi”
in NooJ. Then, on typological grounds, it was decided to treat the Rromani
postpositions as agglutinative, non-inflectional, morphemes. Rromani postpositions are appended to substantives in the oblique case and in some cases
cumulative (as in Modern Indic). In addition, the postposition of possession may
be inflected in gender, number and case as an adjective (-qo, -qi, -qe of as basic
forms, with variants). Accordingly, no less than some 250 potential forms are to
be encountered for postpositions, covering all basic dialectal variants. However,
they may all be rendered, by a much more economical system, appropriate to
both Rromani grammar and computational analysis. Moreover, we investigated
the system of countableness in Rromani nouns when relevant.