Development of Inter-primitive Grammar for Construction of Kannada Language Vowels and Consonants Based on Their Hierarchical Structures

Basavaraj S. Anami, Deepa S. Garag

Abstract: Kannada, 2500 years old, the administrative and official language of Karnataka state, India. The language script comprises of 16 vowels and 34 consonants, which are formed with primitives, connection points and relative positions of other primitives. The writing skill of the language needs teaching, the teachers and parents put efforts on children to make them learn the good writing skills. Here lies the scope for automation. Robots assist children in constructing the characters of the language and improve their handwriting skills. Till date, formalism has been applied to languages to check their syntax and semantics to frame words, sentences and paragraphs. But not for the character construction, which needs a formal approach. This paper presents the development of Inter-Primitive Grammar for Construction of Kannada Language Vowels and Consonants based on their Hierarchical Structures. The unambiguous Context Free Grammar (CFG), consisting of a combination of a set of primitives written in specific sequence for construction of Kannada vowels and consonants is devised. Since two primitives are connected at a time, productions are written in Chomsky Normal Form (CNF). To corroborate the grammar, a given string of primitives as input to the tools, the corresponding transliteration code for the given character is generated. Lex and Yacc tools are used, to verify the completeness and soundness of the grammar.