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On the applicability of the dictionaries of Old English to linguistic research

Paper · 2017 · Darío Metola Rodríguez

Summary

This article asks how well the main dictionaries of Old English support modern linguistic work, and it traces the shift from print-era lexicography to electronic lexicography. Metola Rodríguez compares four works: Bosworth-Toller (with Toller's 1921 Supplement and Campbell's 1972 addenda), Sweet's student dictionary, Hall-Merritt's concise dictionary, and the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), which covers A-G. The comparison looks at entries and lemmatisation, headword spelling, variant spellings and cross-references, vowel length, and textual evidence. To count entries, it uses a sample stretch of headwords from fe- to feo-, chosen so that the incomplete DOE can be compared fairly. Each older dictionary turns out to have its own strength. Bosworth-Toller is broad and gives etymology. Sweet is accurate and groups words by family. Hall-Merritt spells headwords consistently. The DOE is judged the most suitable for current research. It rests on its own corpus, is stored as a searchable online database, and is revised continuously. Above all, it ties each meaning to the morphosyntactic patterns in which the word appears.

Key points

  • The four sources are Bosworth-Toller (first published 1898), Sweet (1896), Hall-Merritt (1894; revised by Merritt), and the DOE (Healey et al. 2008, letters A-G).
  • In the fe-–feo- sample, Hall-Merritt has the most headwords. Some of these are only redirects, though: feas and feast are spelling variants pointing to fæs and fæst.
  • Bosworth-Toller does not always lemmatise, so some inflected forms (such as past participles) appear as headwords. Its cross-references can also form chains, for example ciele → cile → cyle.
  • The DOE is built on the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (2004 version: about 3,000 texts and 3 million words). It can be searched by headword and within an entry, but a single query cannot span several headwords.
  • All four dictionaries lean towards West Saxon spellings, because most surviving texts are in that dialect. The DOE in particular follows the spelling of late texts.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Variant spellings should lead to the canonical lemma in one step; redirects that pass through intermediate variants waste the reader's time and hide errors.
  • I2. A large headword count can hide entries that are only inflected forms or spelling redirects, so the number of entries is not the same as the amount of information.
  • I3. The DOE links each sense to a construction; for ā-būgan, an inanimate subject plus a genitive of person gives 'to bow', while a dative of person gives 'to submit to'.
  • I4. Sweet arranges entries by word family as well as alphabetically, so derived and compound words sit next to their base.
  • I5. Resources of different completeness were compared only on a fixed slice that all of them cover, which keeps the comparison fair to the unfinished DOE.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): Make the lemma and variant tables in crate en point straight to the canonical lemma, and add a check that flags chains or cycles of redirects.
  • I2 (world): When measuring lexicon or ontology coverage, count only entries with real content and leave out alias or redirect entries, so coverage numbers are not inflated.
  • I3 (frames): Select verb senses and semantic roles from the argument pattern visible in the UD tree, such as case or oblique type and subject animacy, which keeps each choice explainable.
  • I4 (world): Store derivational families as explicit links in the compiled knowledge, so a reader can move from a derived word to its base concept.
  • I5 (learn): When comparing lexicons, parsers or treebanks of uneven coverage, evaluate them on their shared overlap so that missing coverage does not look like lower quality.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de La RiojaLogroño · Spain13 works · 74 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Darío Metola Rodríguez. 2017. On the applicability of the dictionaries of Old English to linguistic research. Journal of English Studies 15.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18172/jes.3208

@article{rodriguez2017applicability,
  title = {{On the applicability of the dictionaries of Old English to linguistic research}},
  author = {Darío Metola Rodríguez},
  journal = {Journal of English Studies 15},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.18172/jes.3208},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3208}
}

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