Re:Learn to read Middle English
by robaato on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @04:47PM
(#23470726)
Takes me back to my university days and the holiday project I got involved in as part of the Middle English Dialect Project lead by Dr Michael Benskin.
I helped with programming for processing/typesetting of the various texts and the production of "dot maps" and other maps for the data of the corpus of some 320 words which were (manually) collected from thousands of manuscripts.
E.g. text 1423, (maybe with a known scribe, usually with a location), spelled such and such a word in the following N ways (scribes often had a preferred spelling, but weren't always consistent).
With such maps, among other thints, you could start to place unknown texts by doing some simple Venn diagrams for spellings it contained.
The original (referenced above) was printed, subsequently, it was put online.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/intros/atlas_preface.html
I helped with programming for processing/typesetting of the various texts and the production of "dot maps" and other maps for the data of the corpus of some 320 words which were (manually) collected from thousands of manuscripts.
E.g. text 1423, (maybe with a known scribe, usually with a location), spelled such and such a word in the following N ways (scribes often had a preferred spelling, but weren't always consistent).
With such maps, among other thints, you could start to place unknown texts by doing some simple Venn diagrams for spellings it contained.
The original (referenced above) was printed, subsequently, it was put online.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html
Maybe when I retire I can help them tidy it up :)