---
title: "Une description morphologique structurée en arbre du verbe akkadien qui utilise — Barthélémy 2009"
description: "This is the French, long version of the Karamel grammar of the Akkadian verb. 26 references."
authors: ["François Barthélémy"]
year: 2009
venue: "Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 50, Numéro 2 : Langues anciennes [Ancient Languages]"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2009.tal-2.8/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/barthelemy-2009-une-description-morphologique-structuree-en/"
---
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# Une description morphologique structurée en arbre du verbe akkadien qui utilise des structures de traits et des transducteurs multirubans [A Tree-Structured morphological description of the Akkadian verb which uses Feature Structures and Multi-tape Transducers]

**Authors:** [François Barthélemy](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/francois-barthelemy/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 50, Numéro 2 : Langues anciennes [Ancient Languages] (pp. 173–199) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2009.tal-2.8](https://aclanthology.org/2009.tal-2.8/) · library `aclbulk-2009-barthelemy-une-description-morphologique-structuree-en` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**1** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2466756213) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 50, Numéro 2 : Langues anciennes Ancient Languages](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2009.tal-2/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

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- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2009.tal-2.8.pdf)
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**Authors (1)**

1. [Barthélémy, François](https://openalex.org/A5017597143) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145063724) · h 5 · 61 citations · 28 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

This is the French, long version of the Karamel grammar of the Akkadian verb. Each verb form is a tree: a core (root, stem gemination, infixes, aspect vowels) and, around it, personal affixes and clitics. Inside the core, small parts are separated by the rule that a part must be significant and determined by a set of features. The author distinguishes three kinds of vowel: aspectual, lexical, and support vowels, which vanish in weak contexts. Morphotactics are simultaneous constraints on the structure; surface changes are a cascade of rewrite rules. The grammar has 71 regular expressions, 65 computations and 6 rules. The transducer without lexicon has about 496,000 states, and with a 799-root lexicon about 3 million. Coverage is partial: strong triliteral verbs and verbs with one weak radical; the test data are conjugation tables from textbooks and a few dozen forms from the Code of Hammurabi, which the author says is not a representative coverage measure. The paper argues that the two-vowel scheme of older handbooks is not well supported, and that support vowels are better inserted in a fixed priority order than deleted from a full form.

## Ideas

- I1. Insert support vowels by an ordered priority list instead of writing all vowels and deleting the useless ones. The author reports that the deletion approach gave catastrophic results in his trial, so the test is a comparison: both directions run on the same forms, with the error counted for each.

## For Mova

- I2. Test the claim that only one vowel of the Akkadian verb depends on all four features (aspect, voice, sub-voice, lexical class), and that it is usually the last one. A small Hebrew check on the binyan vowels in [languages/hbo/06-verb.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/06-verb/) can say whether the same holds for Biblical forms in MACULA.
- I3. Run the transducer twice, with and without a root lexicon. Without the lexicon, the grammar proposes candidate roots for an unknown form; with it, the output is limited to known roots. For `tools/hbo`, a no-lexicon mode that lists candidate roots for unknown words would be a useful and explainable fallback.

I1 and I2 go into [languages/hbo/03-phonology.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/03-phonology/) and [languages/hbo/06-verb.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/06-verb/) (vocalisation and the vowel positions of the verb). I3 is a mode for the lexicon step, [languages/hbo/10-lexicon.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/), and a test in `tools/hbo`. The weak-verb section of the paper is a reference for [languages/hbo/07-weak-verbs.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/07-weak-verbs/).

## Institutions

[🔬**Analyse Linguistique Profonde à Grande Echelle** Paris · France 11 works · 1,087 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/analyse-linguistique-profonde-a-grande-echelle/)

Topics[Akkadian and cuneiform NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/akkadian-cuneiform-nlp/) · [Morphology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/morphology/) · [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/)

## Cite

Cite as François Barthélémy. 2009. Une description morphologique structurée en arbre du verbe akkadien qui utilise des structures de traits et des transducteurs multirubans [A Tree-Structured morphological description of the Akkadian verb which uses Feature Structures and Multi-tape Transducers]. Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 50, Numéro 2 : Langues anciennes [Ancient Languages].

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{barthelemy2009une,
  title = {{Une description morphologique structurée en arbre du verbe akkadien qui utilise des structures de traits et des transducteurs multirubans [A Tree-Structured morphological description of the Akkadian verb which uses Feature Structures and Multi-tape Transducers]}},
  author = {François Barthélémy},
  booktitle = {Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 50, Numéro 2 : Langues anciennes [Ancient Languages]},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2009.tal-2.8/}
}
```

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## References

26 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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