Workshop on relational databases of Old English. Design and implementation

The aim of this worshop is to present the relational database of Old English The Grid. The Grid represents a development of the lexical database Nerthus (www.nerthusproject.com), with the significant difference that Nerthus is a type database with approximately thirty thousand files whereas The Grid represents a token database with around three million files. In qualitative terms, Nerthus consists of one block of information whereas The Grid comprises six blocks of related information, including an unlemmatized part, a lemmatized part, a fragment concordance, a word concordance, a reverse index and an index of secondary sources. The Grid relies on several lexicological and lexicographical sources. On the lexicological side, it draws on various secondary sources for the study of Old English morphology, syntax, semantics and dialectology, as well as a number of seminal works in the field of the old Germanic languages. On the lexicographical side, The Grid is based on the standard dictionaries of Old English, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and The student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon. The textual attestations have been retrieved from The Dictionary of Old English Corpus while type analysis relies on the dictionaries just cited.

References

• Bosworth, J. and T. N. Toller. 1973 (1898). An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Clark Hall, J. R. 1996 (1896). A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

• Healey, A. diPaolo, ed., with J. Price Wilkin and X. Xiang. 2004. The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.

• Sweet, H. 1976 (1896). The student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.