Electronic Resources for Historical Linguists. Part 2: Dictionaries and Related Resources

“Electronic Resources for Historical Linguists. Part 2: Dictionaries and Related Resources”

Christian Kay University of Glasgow, UK Irené Wotherspoon University of Glasgow, UK Susan Rennie Scottish National Dictionary Association, UK Anne McDermott University of Birmingham, UK

Chair: Christian Kay The set of papers will be followed by a discussion, which may include points from Part 1: Medieval Studies (session 1.2 on Saturday 22 July).

Developing a User Interface for the Historical Thesaurus of English Ingres Database

Irené Wotherspoon

This is effectively a continuation of a paper published in Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol 7, 1992, which described the issues and processes involved in transferring the legacy database of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) in dBase 11.4 into Ingres 6.1, chosen as being able to support the retrieval of complex information. During a long-term project like HTE, spanning decades rather than years, there will obviously be a huge change in the software available, and software in use will become obsolete. It is therefore vital to transfer the database into new options where feasible. The paper describes the problems encountered in developing a front-end for the Ingres database, now in OpenIngres O.I.2.0, which would cope with the multiple conditions of the queries required in what is essentially a research tool, but which would also be acceptably user-friendly. The user interface now in use is BI/query, the successor to GQL, and this will be described and demonstrated. The complexities of retrieval from the HTE arise from the data concerned with the currency of the words, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary. This consists of a) actual starting and finishing dates for periods of currency; b) the qualifiers ante and circa, as in the OED. (These are not used in the OED CD queries, but are necessary for retrieving e.g. words current before a specified date); c) indicators for continuous or discontinuous currency; d) indicator of present currency, e) Old English, covering all dates before 1150; f) style and status labels from the OED attached to periods of currency - a word may be labelled e.g. 'vulgar' for only part of its currency.

The Electronic Scottish National Dictionary: Work in Progress

Susan Rennie

The Scottish National Dictionary (SND) is the standard historical dictionary of modern Scots, covering the period from 1700 to the present. This presentation will describe the current project to digitise the SND to produce the eSND, which will eventually be output on the Internet. It will include a brief description of the SND itself, outlining its history, content and structure, and describe how the eSND will differ from the printed text, in particular by integrating the original Supplement and adding new material from the SNDA's ongoing research. The various stages of the eSND project will then be discussed, using examples from the work in progress:

1. the data capture, which is being done through scanning and OCR of the printed text;
2. the conversion of the OCR data to full XML mark-up, including details of the actual mark-up scheme (which is based on the TEI guidelines), and how this has been adapted to suit the SND text;
3. the integration of the original Supplement and new material;
4. the development of search tools and a web interface.

Details will also be given of the new proposal to combine the eSND with an electronic version of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (eDOST), sharing the same mark-up scheme, search software and interface, to produce a comprehensive electronic resource covering Scots from the early medieval period to the present day.

Early Dictionaries of English and Historical Corpora

Anne McDermott

This paper discusses the implications for historical corpora of an examination of some early dictionaries of English. Comparison is made between Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and works such as Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), and Robert Ainsworth's influential Linguae Latinae Compendiarius (1736). The claim that early English-English dictionaries contained many "hard words", i.e. words, often from classical sources, which had infrequent or nil occurrence in the language at the time, is examined by checking the occurrence of such words in historical corpora. This leads to an examination of the corpora themselves and comparison with corpora of modern English. Suggestions are made about how historical corpora might be developed in future, for example by offering domain-specific search facilities. Reference will be made to A dictionary of the English language on CD-ROM: the first and fourth editions, Samuel Johnson, edited by Anne McDermott (Cambridge : CUP in association with the University of Birmingham, 1996)