Latin inflection:?

Question

I don't know if anyone here is able to speak (or write) the "dead language" Latin. But maybe you can even help me without knowing this language ... **I have a database of words (including nouns and verbs). Now I would like to generate all the different (inflected) forms of those nouns and verbs. What would be the best strategy to do this?** As Latin is a highly inflected language, there is: a) [the declension of nouns][1] b) [the conjugation of verbs][2] See this translated page for an example of a verb's conjugation ("mandare"): [conjugation][3] I don't want to type in all those forms for all the words manually. So how can I generate them automatically? What is the best approach? - a list of complex rules how to inflect all the words - Bayesian methods - ... Thank you very much in advance! **Edit (possible solution?):** I found out now that there's a program called "William Whitaker's Words". It creates inflections for latin words as well, so it's exactly doing what I want to do. [Wikipedia][4] says that the program works like this: "Words uses a set of rules based on natural pre-, in-, and suffixation, declension, and conjugation to determine the possibility of an entry. As a consequence of this approach of analysing the structure of words, there is no guarantee that these words were ever used in Latin literature or speech, even if the program finds a possible meaning to a given word." The program's source is also available [here][5]. But I don't really understand how this is to work. Can you help me? Maybe this would be the solution to my question ... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation [3]: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.auxilium-online.net/wb/tabelle.php?id=6684&sl=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8 [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whitaker%27s_Words [5]: http://users.erols.com/whitaker/wordsdev.htm

Answer 1

I have never heard of Latin having inflection, although Greek certainly does. Latin suffixes in words of more than two syllables, usually have the accent in the third syllable, while two syllable Latin words have the accent in the first syllable: to exemplify the former, a three-syllable word such as "amabo" (I will love, like), versus "amo" (I love, like). Exceptions to this rule are such words as "omnibus," where the accent is on the first syllable. An interesting point of fact is that the first primer on the English language was in Latin, even though English is a Saxon, German language for the most part.