Interface of Old English dictionaries. Sorting out headword spelling and format differences

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the interface of Old English dictionaries that has beendesigned and implemented with the Knowledge Base of Old English. The Knowledge Baseof Old English is a grid of relational lexical databases that comprises textual andlexicographical sources and is currently being used for annotating ParCorOEv2. An openaccess annotated parallel corpus Old English-English (Martín Arista et al. 2021). Thedictionary interface is a relational lexical database that links a given headword to its correlatesin the other dictionaries filed in the database. The dictionary interface is comprised of twobuilding blocks: a lemmatised and an unlemmatised component. The lemmatised componentaddresses the question of stem spelling, while the unlemmatised component waives formatdifferences between headwords. The method, therefore, includes both type analysis (thevarious headword spellings in the dictionaries) and token analysis (the different inflectionalforms provided by the lexicographers). The following dictionaries have been considered inthis study: A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Hall 1894), The Student´s Dictionary ofAnglo-Saxon (Sweet 1896), Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Bosworth and Toller 1898) and theDictionary of Old English (Healey et al. 2018). Inflectional forms and morphological tagshave been extracted from The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose(Taylor et al. 2003). The lemmatised component turns out pairs and triplets of dictionaries,such as, respectively, ǣ-wrītere_SW>>>ǽ-wrítere_BT and þúsendfeald_BT>>>ðūsendfeald_CHM>>>þūsend-feald_SW. The result of queries in theunlemmatised component has the form kycenan_N^G_CYCENE_BT>>>cycene_DOE,which includes the YCOE inflection and morphological tag, as well as the correspondinglemma in BT and the DOE. With these results, the dictionary interface bridges the gapbetween the available lexicographical products of Old English, which opt for variousheadword spellings (as Ellis 1993 points out) and for divergent formats. It also enhances therecoverability of information in corpus analysis by directly relating textual forms to therelevant dictionary entry. Finally, the dictionary interface sheds light on the making of the dictionaries in general and the choice of headword in particular. Conclusions will be drawnin these areas.