''A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English'' (LAEME) is a digital,
corpus
Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to:
Linguistics
* Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts
* Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files
* Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics
Music
* ...
-driven, historical
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...
resource for
Early Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...
(1150–1325). LAEME combines a searchable Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), an Index of Sources, and
dot maps showing the distribution of textual dialect features. LAEME is headed by the University of Edinburgh's Margaret Laing, and includes contributions from Roger Lass (University of Cape Town), and web-scripts by Keith Williamson, Vasilis Karaiskos (University of Edinburgh) and Sherrylyn Branchaw (University of California, LA).
Dating from 1987, a year after the publication of ''A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English'' (LALME), LAEME's parent project, LAEME builds on medieval dialect methodologies developed for LALME, but parts ways with the latter by employing
corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language, study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feas ...
methods. In its present form, such methods include the
lexico-grammatical tagging of a select but comprehensive Early Middle English corpus, to which an ongoing project will add
syntactic parsing
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lat ...
(see Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English P-LAEME). Public access to a fully tagged, syntactically annotated corpus should provide unprecedented scope for phonological, lexico-grammatical, semantic, pragmatic as well as dialectal inquiry into a period marked by rapid linguistic change but also by a paucity of surviving texts. At the lexical level, further scope is added by ''A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies'' (CoNE, Version 1.1, 2013). CoNE derives a Corpus of Changes (CC) from LAEME's Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), giving relative chronologies of lexical forms annotated by Special Codes. CoNE's narrative etymologies are not based on semantic backtracking through cognates, but on the processual narrative of word forms through time.
Background
Prior to the advent of modern linguistics, medieval philologists had sought to describe patterns of linguistic variation on the basis of literary language. This approach posed significant problems, as literary language was and is more likely to be imitative, archaizing, or syncretic than everyday documentary language. Texts composed in a literary tradition or copied from literary exemplars, then, are not ideal for use in reconstructing the distribution of dialect features for a given period. Nevertheless, to take the most famous Middle English instance, J.R.R. Tolkien was able to conjecture the
AB literary dialect by comparing manuscripts of the
Katherine Group
The so-called ''Katherine Group'' is a group of five 13th century Middle English texts composed by an anonymous author of the English West Midlands, in a variety of Middle English known as AB language.
The texts are all addressed to anchoresses ...
("B") and the
Ancrene Wisse
''Ancrene Wisse'' (also known as the ''Ancrene Riwle'' or ''Guide for Anchoresses'') is an anonymous monastic rule (or manual) for female anchoresses written in the early 13th century.
The work consists of eight parts: divine service, keeping the ...
("A"). Drawing on his personal knowledge of Old English and Old Norse, while counting and cataloging thousands of verbs by hand, Tolkien argued for a regional literary standard localized to north-west Herefordshire that preserved Old English elements into the 13th century. His culminating philological essay,
Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad
"Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad" is a 1929 essay by J. R. R. Tolkien on the thirteenth century Middle English treatise ''Ancrene Wisse'' ("The Anchoresses' Rule") and on the tract on virginity '' Hali Meiðhad'' ("Holy Maidenhood"). The essay has ...
(1929), has been called "one of the great triumphs of English philology" but also "philology's last gasp."
In the decade after this pioneering work, Middle English dialect studies went on generational hiatus. LALME, whose initial stages date to 1952, ushered in the next phase. Motivated by strong arguments for scribal normalization, historical
dialectologists were no longer constrained by the unevenness of scribal fidelity. Medieval dialect studies would now rely on the relative consistency of scribal translation into a scribe's own language, while developing techniques for discriminating source from scribe.
Angus McIntosh, one of LALME's compilers, "observed that most copied Middle English texts were...in language that was dialectally homogeneous,",
suggesting scribal conversion of exemplar language into local varieties. Problematically, though, such varieties might not reflect the geographic areas of composition, since scribes often traveled to copying centers from far afield. This and other problems arising from the diversity of scribal practices (e.g. literam, or literal, and
mischsprache, or mixed-language copying) placed a premium on texts of explicit local provenance to anchor dialectal domains. Such anchor texts, often correspondence or legal documents, form the basis of LALME's fit-technique. Michael Benskin, another LALME compiler, describes the fit-technique as a "mechanical means of discovering whereabouts in the continuum of accents
nunfamiliar accent belongs."
This is done by comparing word forms in texts of uncertain origin against like forms attested in the anchor matrix, a comparison which "depends on the progressive elimination of the areas to which the individual elements of the accent do ''not'' belong."
Only frequently attested items of particular dialectal salience are so compared. In the case of LALME, these items were solicited through text questionnaires later converted into Linguistic Profiles (LPs). Questionnaires were not deemed practicable in LAEME's case, since the amount of linguistic information desired from comparatively fewer, comparatively fragmentary texts would have made them unwieldy. Instead, LAEME opted for corpus digitization.
Corpus and tools
The period covered by LAEME is of prime grammatical and phonological interest, as the language was undergoing widespread
inflectional loss from OE but at different rates in different regions. Variation within phonological categories and inflectional paradigms possess dialectal and base-grammatical significance. Emergent orthography of phonetically-variable characters
yogh
The letter yogh (ȝogh) ( ; Scots Language, Scots: ; Middle English: ) was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing ''y'' () and various velar consonant , velar phonemes. It was derived from the Insular G, Insular form of the letter ...
,
thorn
Thorn(s) or The Thorn(s) may refer to:
Botany
* Thorns, spines, and prickles, sharp structures on plants
* ''Crataegus monogyna'', or common hawthorn, a plant species
Comics and literature
* Rose and Thorn, the two personalities of two DC Com ...
and
edh index other changes in the language. Scribes during this period show a proportionally higher preference for literam and mixed-language copying, resulting in a higher proportion of composite texts compared to later periods. Relict usage, where older exemplar forms remain unmodified in a translated text, and constrained selection, where exemplar forms are maintained because of scribal familiarity, pose additional problems for dialectal discrimination.
Students of the period must also take into account its pronounced text/speech
diglossia
In linguistics, diglossia () is a situation in which two dialects or languages are used (in fairly strict compartmentalization) by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety (labeled " ...
, with the majority of texts composed in Latin or French. Because LAEME's anchor matrix is thin and patchy, its dialectal fits are informed approximations subject to revision. LAEME's texts overall are geographically and temporally uneven, extremely sparse for its first half-century and for Northern varieties in general, much denser for Southern varieties and through its latter half-century, where it begins to overlap with LALME.
The above complexities and complications have obliged LAEME's architects to build the atlas around a digitized corpus of lexico-grammatically tagged texts that can be searched and compared according to the research needs of users. Instead of creating Linguistic Profiles from questionnaire responses, text dictionaries - taxonomical inventories of each text language - are derived from tagged texts. Independent searchability multiplies LAEME's usages across disciplines, as scholars and researchers can generate their own Form and Tag Dictionaries, Feature Maps, and Concordances. LAEME surpasses its remit as a dialect resource by offering a suite of multi-function linguistic tools for public use. This versatility accords with Angus McIntosh's progressive vision for LALME, which he saw as "more likely to benefit those concerned with the literature and culture and social structure of medieval England than those primarily concerned with...linguistics."
An example of a multi-function LAEME tool is the Concordance. Users begin by selecting a tag type (suffixes, grammatical words, inflection, lexis), entering a search string, and then a position limiter (initial, medial, final). This search is followed by a filter set allowing users to specify counties, number of words to precede and/or proceed the search string, and sorting parameters (form, tag, date, file). Finally, users may select specific tagged forms generated by the search. Entries in the resulting concordance link to manuscript descriptions and to corresponding text dictionaries.
Users are able to view contextualized instances of items indexed to coded sources available in several file types. Similar processes can be used to create Tag and Form Dictionaries with frequency counts, and to generate Feature Maps.
References
External links
* {{Cite web, url=http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html, title=A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, v. 2.0, website=www.lel.ed.ac.uk, access-date=2017-05-01
*
An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English" www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/CoNE/CoNE.html
Linguistic atlases
Middle English