This analyzer takes Frantz’s (2017) Blackfoot Grammar and Blackfoot Dictionary as a reference for Blackfoot phonology, morphology, standardized orthography, and lexical items. It is a work in progress, with an end goal of accounting for every nominal inflection attested for in the Grammar and Dictionary. Refer especially to Chapter 2 of the Grammar for basics of Blackfoot noun inflection, Chapter 5 for phonological rules, Chapter 14 for possessive nouns, Chapter 15 for allomorphy, and Appendix B for an exhaustive list of Blackfoot phonological rules.
We use this spreadsheet (at present scarcely-populated) to keep track of progress.
The analyzer is implemented with the Helsinki Finite-State Technology toolkit. Please refer to their Download And Install page to get the right version for your system (developed with the Mac OS X version).
Start up hsft-xfst from blackfoot.script, which encodes phonological and allomorphy rules, and composes them with the lexicon defined in blackfoot.lexc:
<PATH>/<TO>/hfst/bin/hfst-xfst -l blackfoot.script
To generate a surface form from an abstract representation (refer to blackfoot.lexc for the full list of multicharacter symbols/glosses):
hfst[1]: apply down natáyo+3S
natáyowa
To analyze a surface form:
hfst[1]: apply up kakkóíksi
kakkóó+AN.P
Please address any questions or suggestions to brozonoyer@brandeis.edu or erikandersen@brandeis.edu.
Donald G. Frantz. 2017. Blackfoot Grammar, 3 edition. University of Toronto Press.
Donald G. Frantz and Norma Jean Russell. 2017. Blackfoot Dictionary of Stems, Roots, and Affixes, 3 edition. University of Toronto Press.
University of Helsinki. 2003-2008. Helsinki Finite State Technology (HFST).
Kenneth R. Beesley and Lauri Karttunen. 2003. Finite State Morphology. CSLI Publications.