This repository contains some basic NLP resources for the Chichewa language. Currently, all that's here is a basic lexicon (in the folder lexicon) and a simple script for doing morphological generation of verb forms: scripts/gen.pl.

Also potentially useful is the makefile in the lexicon directory, which was a quick and dirty attempt to generate a very large Chichewa word list as part of another project.

These scripts were written by @kscanne, with linguistic advice from @ceekays.

There are better ways of doing all of this. A proper morphological transducer would allow generation and analysis and would be much faster as well.

The lexicon files are organized by part of speech. A file named nA-B.txt should contain nouns from class A whose plurals are in class B. If B==x, then the noun has no plural form.

The script gen.pl is designed to work in a pipeline. It reads in lines that look like this:

NM+SM+TM+OM^kangaz^AM

and outputs all possible surface forms with the given root:

akangaza (++a1++^kangaz^a+)
achikangaza (++a1++chi^kangaz^a+)
aikangaza (++a1++i^kangaz^a+)
akakangaza (++a1++ka^kangaz^a+)
alikangaza (++a1++li^kangaz^a+)
amukangaza (++a1++mu^kangaz^a+)
...

The morphological elements NM,SM,TM, etc. are documented in the script. Look at the various makefile targets to see how it's used in practice.