Lexicon of Old Irish

Description

Of the Indo-European languages, Old Irish is one of the most complex and exhibits an especially difficult morphology and orthography. For many students, a dearth of resources make learning this intricate language more difficult. The only scholarly dictionary of Medieval Irish, the Dictionary of the Irish Language (hereafter DIL), has been designed for specialists, not students. Currently, a student who, for example, encounters the verbal form do-chóid in a text, and seeks it in DIL, needs to know its third person singular present indicative form, téit, in order to locate it, its meaning and semantics. Thus, in practice students (and sometimes scholars) often fail to find the objects of their searches, because they are unfamiliar with the requisite headword form. The electronic Lexicon will enable users to find a lexical item by entering any of its word forms, and provide an unprecedented search capacity for Medieval Irish.

The Electronic Lexicon of Medieval Irish consists of a re-edited subset of the information contained in Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language (hereafter DIL), deeply encoded in XML. This subset has been further supplemented with additional forms from John Strachan's Old Irish Paradigms and Glosses. Work is ongoing to update the the etymologies of words (using Lexique Étymologique de L'Irlandais Ancien) that are not given a satisfactory treatment in DIL.

The first volume of the Lexicon contains 1866 headwords. This includes any part of speech (apart from verbs) beginning with the letter b, any form of the verb téit, the definite article, and the first person singular possessive and personal pronouns. The Lexicon will be updated incrementally over the coming months, and RSS feeds will give exact details about the words that have been added to it.

The Lexicon as a stand-alone research tool

Because the Lexicon has been encoded in XML, it can be used as a fully searchable text base, the first such fully searchable linguistic text base in medieval Irish studies. As a stand alone research tool, it remedies some of the inherent limitations of DIL, such as the necessity to know a particular word form in order to locate it. It is possible to search the Lexicon for any part of speech by entering any one of its attested forms, whether nouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, causal conjunctions, independent negative particles, letters, interjections, particles, personal and possessive adjectives, prefixes, suffixes, infixed forms, prepositions, substantives, pronomial forms, verbal forms in all attested moods, tenses, voices and numbers; the definite article, verbal nouns, and forms encoded as unclear.

A broad range of languages such as Old Norse, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Hebrew are represented as etyma or comparanda in DIL and while the paper copy can be used as an Irish-English dictionary only, it is possible to search the Lexicon for materials in any of these languages. It is also possible to use the Lexicon as an English to Old Irish dictionary. This in itself represents a contribution to scholarship in that no such reference work is otherwise available. It is also possible to construct specialised vocabularies, for example, in relation to metalwork or the technology of writing, by working from English equivalents. This can be used to trace gaps in the vocabulary, for example, missing terms for technologies, established by other disciplines (for example, archaeology, epigraphy, history).

The Lexicon will also be of use to those involved in lexicostatistics and it will be possible to retrieve, for example, statistics relating to the number of Irish words with a Hebrew etymology, the number of words that originally had a neuter gender or the number of words that have been influenced by Latin orthography.

Scholars involved in textual reconstruction will, for the first time, be able to harness the results of wild card searches across the entire corpus of Irish. If a manuscript has been damaged and, for example, the first and last letters in a word are illegible, its editor must attempt to reconstruct what is missing. Until the creation of the Lexicon, scholars have only been able to draw on their memory and knowledge of Irish as retained in memory, or memory aided by non-systematic collections of forms, to reconstruct what the word was likely to have been. The Lexicon is the first tool of its kind that can be harnessed by scholars of Irish to perform searches---refined with occurrence indicators---to retrieve a list of all the possible words (insofar as the list is complete) that the damaged word could have been. Depending on the context of the word, the scholar can also use other tools such as the lexicostatistics function to establish usage profiles for the word and then draw on their expertise in metrics, rhyme, genre, or dialect etc to choose the most likely word.

Role of the Lexicon in CELT's infrastructure

The Lexi-lookup mechanism is a bookmarklet that end-users can employ in order to highlight a word in the CELT corpus and retrieve that word in the Lexicon. To use the lookup tool, simply follow this link

Documentation, Updates and Contact

The electronic Lexicon of Medieval Irish formed part of Julianne Nyhan's PhD thesis, which was based on the application of XML to the historical lexicography of Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish. The process of creating and compiling the Lexicon is discussed in detail and can be found here.

University College Cork is in the process of securing a new server, and it is hoped that this server will be available in October 2007. At the moment, only basic searches of the data are possible, once the new server is installed, it is hoped that we can offer much more sophisticated searching mechanisms. When the new server arrives, the search potential of the Lexicon will be dramatically increased.

Please note that this is very much a first offering and there are likely to be errors in the material. Further funding has been sought to develop the Lexicon further, and to proof check again all the material that has been gathered, classified and encoded to date. All notifications of errors and corrections will be gratefully received and acknowledged. If you notice any, please contact Julianne Nyhan