loanpy 0.1.7

framework for detecting old loanwords

loanpy is a tool for historical linguists. It extracts sound changes and constraints from an etymological dictionary, generates pseudo-roots for L1, pseudo- sound-substitutions for L2, searches for phonetically identical lexemes and ranks those according to semantic similarity.

Installation

$ python -m pip install loanpy

Getting started

>>> from loanpy import loanfinder as lf

Download and unpack 3 Gigabytes of pretrained Google-News vectors. Move GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin to the folder “data”, the full path to which can be retrieved via:

>>> import os
>>> print(os.path.dirname(lf.__file__)+r"\data")

Following code will compare a set of Gothic words (data/dfgot.csv) with Hungarian words (data/zaicz.csv) and evaluate which elements are the most likely candidates for loanwords. The result can be viewed in data/results/matches.csv:

>>> lf.loandf()

Data Sources

Gábor Zaicz’s Hungarian etymological dictionary from 2006

Gerhard Köbler’s Gothic database

Hungarian Academy of Science’s online version of Uralisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch

License

Academic Free License (AFL) (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)