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In my computational linguistics class, we talked about the complications with parsing English morphemes, and there was a list of orthographic rules for combining morphemes in the slides.

  • consonant doubling
  • e deletion
  • e insertion
  • y replacement (y -> ies, y -> ied)
  • k insertion (panic -> panicked)

I don't know where this comes from but I found it online in slides for several other universities' computational linguistics classes (e.g. slide 9 of https://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~fraser/morphology_2016/two_level_morph.pdf, slide 8 of https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ee0f/ffc479d6c8b1a2c1ac00f25ce751c27f2150.pdf) . Is this a comprehensive list? And if not, is there are comprehensive one somewhere?, or at least discussion as to why this would be a infeasible?

awe lotta
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  • Related: "focussed vs. focused" https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4791/focussed-or-focused-rules-for-doubling-the-last-consonant-when-adding-ed – awe lotta Feb 03 '23 at 00:20
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    No, this is not a comprehensive list. This is a list of the most common examples. – GEdgar Feb 03 '23 at 01:30
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    There are a lot of irregular words in English (although I guess changes to them aren't rules, the dividing line isn't clear, and some irregular words work quite regularly). You could look at how words ending in "-g" or "-ng" are affected, I'm pretty sure there's are rules there. – Stuart F Feb 03 '23 at 09:36
  • @StuartF What do you mean about words ending in "g" or "ng"? – awe lotta Feb 03 '23 at 17:35
  • I think he means things like sing => sang. – Barmar Feb 03 '23 at 21:00
  • Or maybe it's that singer and finger don't rhyme, although their spellings do. – John Lawler Feb 05 '23 at 19:50
  • Section "The alternation rules component" at https://fomafst.github.io/morphtut.html seems to cover what I'm interested in, though it doesn't claim to be comprehensive. Also, I know Plover (machine stenography software) implements orthographic rules for suffixes, but which is essentially what I want, but I don't know if that's comprehensive either. Lastly, the list seems to be sourced from a textbook by Jurafsky & Martin, which is online, so I'll have to take a look there later. – awe lotta Feb 06 '23 at 01:13
  • I always worry when I see someone wants "all" of something. – Lambie Feb 06 '23 at 15:57

1 Answers1

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In British English, there's also u deletion. We have

clamour, clamorous;
vigour, invigorate;
glamour, glamorous;
odour, deodorant.

(But this u deletion doesn't always happen — we have honour and honourable.)

So this isn't an exhaustive list.

Peter Shor
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