Anna Bykova
2025
Smotrom tvoja på ander drogoj verden! Resurrecting Dead Pidgin with Generative Models: Russenorsk Case Study
Alexey Tikhonov
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Sergei Shteiner
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Anna Bykova
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Ivan P. Yamshchikov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Russenorsk, a pidgin language historically used in trade interactions between Russian and Norwegian speakers, represents a unique linguistic phenomenon. In this paper, we attempt to analyze its lexicon using modern large language models (LLMs), based on surviving literary sources. We construct a structured dictionary of the language, grouped by synonyms and word origins. Subsequently, we use this dictionary to formulate hypotheses about the core principles of word formation and grammatical structure in Russenorsk and show which hypotheses generated by large language models correspond to the hypotheses previously proposed ones in the academic literature. We also develop a “reconstruction” translation agent that generates hypothetical Russenorsk renderings of contemporary Russian and Norwegian texts.