MALAGASY The indigenous language of Madagascar John Cadigan & Martin Horn

PART OF THE AUSTRONESIAN FAMILY

GENUS BARITO

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE PAST Mainly an oral tradition until 1800’s Some use of Arabic alphabet until early 1800’s with the arrival of British missionaries; they switched to the Latin alphabet Colonial influences: French, Dutch, English “Frenchification:” nasality PRESENT DAY 18 million speakers Official language alongside French Zefaniasy Bemananjara and Suzy- Andree Ramamojisoa conclude that Malagasy is not popular in written literature

MORPHOLOGY Agglutinative (Andrzejewski 433) : Ifampandrenesana: re (heard) andrenesana (the situation in which one hears something) Ifampandrenesana (the situation in which speech is heard by two or more people) Words tend to be shortened: Miaraka Miara

MORPHOLOGY Inflection: Concatenative (like English) Verbs: 4-5 inflections No past or future tense No perfective Nouns: pronominal plurals no nominal plurals Case Not morphological

POSSESSIVE MARKING Marks possessive noun phrases in a unique way: (98) Dependent marking: English marks the dependent: owner + “‘s” owned (78) Head marking: Hungarian marks the head: owned (32) No marking: owner owned (22) Double marked: owner and owned both marked (6) Other: Malagasy demoted subject such as one you would find in a passive construction (Coene)

5 DISTANCE CONTRASTS IN DEMONSTRATIVES (127) Two-way contrast : English: this and that (88) Three-way contrast Spanish: este, eso, aquel (8) Four-way contrast (7)No distance contrast (4) Five or more: itý io iny iroa itsy near S near H close away far away

WORKS CITED Andrzejewski, Bogumil W., Stanislaw Pilaszewicz, and Witold Tyloch. Literatures in African languages: theoretical issues and sample surveys. Cambridge University Press, Coene, Martine, and Yves D’hulst. "From P to DP: The expression of possession in noun phrases." (2003). Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at Accessed on ) Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. (Available online at Accessed on )

SYNTAX VOS word order Other word orders allowed for emphasis Fronting of focused word Focus also marked with particle Demonstrative determiners precede and follow noun Complex voice system: Actor, object, beneficiary, instrument, etc. can be promoted to subject position (Each also has unique affix) Negation, Yes/No questions expressed with particle tsy (neg), ve (yes/no) before verb Definite marker (ny) precedes noun Adjectives, numerals, quantifiers, relative clauses follow noun Adverbs, some quantifiers precede verb Mamaky boky ny mpianatra “reads book the student” ity boky ity “this book this”

MT PAPERS One paper in the MT archives: Pivot-based Triangulation for Low-Resource Languages (Dholakia & Sarkar 2014) Another paper from EMNLP Beyond Parallel Data: Joint Word Alignment and Decipherment Improves Machine Translation (Dou, Vaswani, & Knight 2014) Paper from University of Washington & Microsoft: Improving Dependency Parsing with Interlinear Glossed Text and Syntactic Projection (Georgi, Xia, & Lewis 2012) Other non-MT ACL papers Morphological analysis, tokenization

MT RESOURCES Google Translate language 81,219 Wikipedia articles written in Malagasy Global Voices Malagasy-English Parallel Corpus 3,000 documents, 100,000 sentences, 2M English words Wortschatz web text corpus 90,791 sentences; 110,517 types; 1,479,752 tokens Unitex Verb dictionary (1,801 simple verbs) Corpus of news articles (2009)

CHALLENGES FOR MT Little prepared monolingual data Even less parallel corpus data Agglutinative = sparse data Variability of word order Complexity due to deixis (context-dependent words)

REFERENCES About World Languages: Qing Dou, Ashish Vaswani, and Kevin Knight Beyond Parallel Data: Joint Word Alignment and Decipherment Improves Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics. Rohit Dholakia and Anoop Sarkar Pivot-based Triangulation for Low-Resource Languages.In Proceedings of AMTA MT Researchers. Ryan Georgi, Fei Xia, and William D. Lewis Improving Dependency Parsing with Interlinear Glossed Text and Syntactic Projection. In Proceedings of COLING Association for Computational Linguistics Global Voices Corpus: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Deutscher Wortschatz Corpus: Malagasy (mlg_web_2012). Leipzig University. Unitex/GramLab: