Automatic Discrimination between Inherited and Borrowed L atin Words in R omance Languages (2021)

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of automatically discriminating between inherited and borrowed Latin words. We introduce a new dataset and investigate the case of Romance languages (Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan), where words directly inherited from Latin coexist with words borrowed from Latin, and explore whether automatic discrimination between them is possible. Having entered the language at a later stage, borrowed words are no longer subject to historical sound shift rules, hence they are presumably less eroded, which is why we expect them to have a different intrinsic structure distinguishable by computational means. We employ several machine learning models to automatically discriminate between inherited and borrowed words and compare their performance with various feature sets. We analyze the models’ predictive power on two versions of the datasets, orthographic and phonetic. We also investigate whether prior knowledge of the etymon provides better results, employing n-gram character features extracted from the word-etymon pairs and from their alignment.

## methodology borrowings from latin are supposedly easily recognized because they are presented in forms close to the latin form in all romance languages. for example, lat. attestationem (meaning testimony/certification) became attestazione (it.), attestation (fr.), atestació (ca.), atestación (es.), atestação (pt.); lat. auctor (meaning author) became autore (it.), auteur (fr.), autor (es., pt.); lat. cultura (meaning culture) became cultura (it., es., pt.), culture (fr.). there are formal differences between inherited and borrowed words from latin: the inherited lexemes have undergone an evolutionary process that has changed their phonetic appearance (e.g. lat. noctem (meaning night) > ro. noapte, fr. nuit, sp. noche), while the borrowed words are generally only adapted to the romance languages' system @xcite ). having entered the language at a later stage, borrowings are presumably less eroded and thus consistently exhibit different phonetic features, which is why we expect them to have a different intrinsic structure distinguishable by computational means. as previously discussed, in from a morphological point of view, one cannot reveal systematic distinct features that characterize the inherited words versus the borrowed ones. the romance nouns' form -be they inherited or borrowed -is, in the great majority of cases, based on the accusative-ablative structure of the latin word: for instance, both es. razón (inherited, meaning reason) and es. ración (borrowed, meaning portion) are originated in the latin accusative-ablative ratione(m) (meaning calculation/proportion). it is true, though, that in a few cases of borrowing the adoption of the nominative form results in the presence of word endings that are not attested in inherited words: e.g. -o in french (écho, lumbago), -i in italian for feminine singular nouns (e.g. aferesi, crisi), or -u in spanish (e.g. espíritu, ímpetu). given that the phonetic form is the interface that we shall mainly consider in our attempt to automatically distinguish between inherited and borrowed words, we need to make a preliminary statement concerning the relation between orthography and pronunciation in the studied languages. among the romance idioms, only french has a deep orthog-raphy and the most conservative spelling system, while the others use a phonemic orthography. although all the romance languages have preserved certain orthographic traits that, far from reflecting the current pronunciation, encode historical features, french is the only language where this characteristic is general and defining. consequently, for an accurate result we must compare both the actual phonetic transcription and the approximation of phonetic structure by orthography. to approach our research question, we apply various machine learning models in two scenarios: in the first one we are looking only at the surface forms of inherited and borrowed words, without any other helpful supplementary information, and in the second one we have access to the etymon of the modern romance words as well. ## experiments in this section we describe and discuss experiments on automatically discriminating between inherited and borrowed latin words. ## conclusions in this paper we have analyzed the automatic discrimination between inherited and borrowed latin words in romance languages, both in orthographic and phonetic form. we have obtained an average f1 over all languages ∼ 90% at orthographic level. we have built a dataset of inherited and borrowed latin words from two sources (wiktionary and dex) in multiple romance language (catalan, french, italian, portuguese, romanian, spanish). we have augmented the data with features provided by linguists in order to increases the system's performance, based on the idea that the optimal approach to computational historical linguistics is to combine the experience and intuitions of linguists with the intelligent processing and automation capabilities of computational tools.