Converging Transition Networks and Sub-Morphemic Regularities in Latin Noun Inflection

Many Latin inflectional endings share material constituting less than a whole morpheme. Conventional linguistic analysis must either ignore the shared material (treating it as historical relics) or make it into morphemes through abstract morphophonemics, poorly motivated in Latin. The shared material contributes to economy of representation when the inflectional system is stored as a transition network (character tree), a representation that is computationally efficient and may be psychologically realistic. For example, all the genitive plural endings can converge on “—u—m—〈GenPl〉” although the material preceding this depends on the inflectional class.