27.3255, Software: English; Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Lexicography; Sociolinguistics: EDD Online

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3255. Fri Aug 12 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3255, Software: English; Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Lexicography; Sociolinguistics: EDD Online

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Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2016 09:55:25
From: Manfred Markus [manfred.markus at uibk.ac.at]
Subject: English; Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Lexicography; Sociolinguistics: EDD Online

 
The proof of the pudding is in its eating. So have a taste of EDD Online
(eddonline-proj at uibk.ac.at), before you start reading the following.

EDD Online is a digitised version of Joseph Wright's English Dialect
Dictionary, which was published between 1898 and 1905 and covers the time from
1700 to 1904, with occasional etymological references to the preceding
thousand years, i.e. 700-1700. The digitisation naturally implies OCR (Optical
Character Recognition), based on both scanning and typing. The paper version
of the dictionary comprises some 4.500 pages, densely printed in two columns.
The dialects depicted are those of the British Isles, historically including
the whole of Ireland, as well as the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa and
"colonial" Englishes. The dictionary also includes what, from a later point of
view, would be called "sociolects", namely colloquial English, slang and cant,
as well as "technical" Englishes as used by professional groups such as
farmers, miners etc.

EDD Online is also the name of the Innsbruck project, supported by the
Austrian Science Fund and claiming to provide an optimally digitised version
of Wright's Dictionary. This (initially) three-year project (April 2011 to
March 2014) is based on the work of a previous project, SPEED (Spoken English
in Early Dialects), which ran from 2006 to 2010 and had the purpose of
presenting a preliminary online version of the Dictionary. The text of this
earlier beta version was produced by a scanner, with the result of an
unavoidably large number of misreadings. The subsequent (automatic) tagging of
the roughly 4,500 pages of the text was,  naturally, insufficient, as was the
interface provided for this data. EDD Online is, thus, the necessary follow-up
project of SPEED, with the aim of correcting the mistakes in SPEED, both
orthographic and tagging. Moreover, the purpose of EDD Online has been
substantially to improve the interface, i.e. the surface on the screen
allowing access to the Dictionary, in accordance with our corrections and with
quite a number of better insights on what researchers can and will wish to do
with Wright's EDD.

Overall structure: Apart from its paraphernalia (e.g. introduction, list of
abbreviations, bibliography, Corrigenda, English Dialect Grammar), the six
volumes of the EDD consist of some 65.000 entries alphabetically arranged. To
be more precise: the book comprises 71.484 headwords in 64.486 entries. The
exactly 4,505 pages of the dictionary do not include the Supplement presented
on pages 1 to 179 of volume VI because this contains, according to Wright,
material "the authority for which was not sufficient" (vol. VI, p. 1 of
Suppl.). It also has a structure somewhat deviant from that of the main part
of the Dictionary. The Innsbruck project team have, however, integrated
Wright's list of Corrigenda, marking the necessary emendations in the running
text by an attribute sicCorr="true". Users finding passages in EDD Online that
deviate from the original paper version of the Dictionary should check the
Corrigenda before they reclaim an error.

While it fairly soon became obvious in our correction work letter-wise that
the Dictionary is not totally homogeneous in its use of descriptive features,
the work of Wright and his team all in all has turned out to be admirably
scrupulous, knowledgeable and reliable. This is surely still the best and most
comprehensive English dialect dictionary ever published. Our ambitious and
sophisticated Innsbruck software corresponds to the Dictionary's complex
structure: the interface provides ten search parameters (from headwords to
variants), eight filters (of dialectal areas, time of occurrence, usage
labels, etymology and many others), maps of distribution, pictures of flora
and fauna, alternative sorting routines, a kwik concordance for quotation
texts, and various other software options. 


Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Historical Linguistics
                     Lexicography
                     Sociolinguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)



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