hltdi/HornMorpho

Morphological processing for languages of the Horn of Africa =========================== HornMorpho, version 5.3.6 =========================== **April 8, 2026** ------------ Introduction ------------ **HornMorpho** (HM) is a Python program that performs morphological analysis and generation for various languages of the Horn of Africa. The languages supported in Version 5.3 are Amharic (አማርኛ), Oromo (Afaan Oromoo, Oromiffa), Tigrinya (Tigrigna, ትግርኛ), and Tigre (ትግሬ, ትግራይት). Most examples within this document are Amharic; future versions will include more examples from the other languages. If your application can benefit from explicit linguistic information about the structure and grammatical properties of words in these languages, then you may want to use HM. HM can tell you, for example, that the verb የማይደረገው is negative, that the noun አባቴን is the object of some verb, that the stem (the word without prefixes and suffixes) of the verb የምንፈልጋቸው is -ፈልግ-, that the lemma (basic form) of the verb እንደሚመኟቸው is ተመኘ, that is, that this verb has something to do with ‘longing’. HM can also tell you that the word እንደሚመኟቸው consists of five segments (morphemes): እንደም+ይ+መኝ+ኡ+ኣቸው. HM is a rule-based program; that is, the knowledge in the program is based on explicit linguistic rules and a *lexicon*, a dictionary of basic word forms (stems and roots), rather than on machine learning of the knowledge from a corpus. - For Amharic, the lexicon is extracted mainly from Amsalu Aklilu’s *Amharic-English Dictionary* (Addis Ababa, Kuraz, 2004). The rules come from many grammars of the language. - For Tigrinya, the lexicon is from Thomas Leiper Kane’s *Tigrinya-English Dictionary* (Kensington, MD, USA, Dunwoody Press, 2000). The rules come mainly from Wolf Leslau’s *Documents Tigrigna, Grammaire et Textes* (Paris, Librarie C. Klincksieck, 1941) and Amanuel Sahle’s *ሰዋስው ትግርኛ ብሰፊሕ* (Lawrenceville, NJ, Red Sea Press, 1998). - For Oromo, the lexicon is from two dictionaries, Gene B. Gragg’s *Oromo Dictionary* (African Studies Center, Michigan S …