Corpus of Scottish Correspondence
(information provided by Anneli Meurman-Solin)
The Corpus of Scottish Correspondence (CSC), 1500-1730, compiled by Anneli Meurman-Solin (University of Helsinki), comprises diplomatically transcribed and digitized manuscript originals of royal, official and family letters by male and female writers originating from the various areas of Scotland. The data are tagged using software developed by Keith Williamson (Institute for Historical Dialectology, University of Edinburgh). The CSC will be published as a web-based resource, with a detailed introduction and manual, in 2007.
Faclair na Gàidhlig: an editorial and textual foundation
(information provided by Lorna Pike)
This project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust at the University of Edinburgh, will provide the foundation for the historical dictionary of Scottish Gaelic, Faclair na Gàidhlig (www.faclair.ac.uk). It will produce editorial guidelines and textual background on key texts for use as training and reference tools by lexicographers. The next stage will be to create database of citations for the dictionary itself.
A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, Phase 1: 1380 to 1500
(information provided by Keith Williamson)
A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots aims to portray the diatopic and diachronic distribution of the language of texts written in Older Scots between 1380 and 1700. Data comprise a computer-stored corpus of texts transcribed from manuscript or facsimile and tagged lexico-grammatically.
For more see: http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/ihd.html
The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE)
The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE) is a corpus of dialect speech from Tyneside in North-East England. It is based on two pre-existing corpora, one of them collected in the late 1960s by the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS) project, and the other in 1994 by the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) project. NECTE amalgamates the TLS and PVC materials into a single Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-conformant XML-encoded corpus and makes them available in a variety of aligned formats: digitized audio, standard orthographic transcription, phonetic transcription, and part-of-speech tagged. Its website can be accessed at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte and it describes the NECTE corpus in detail. Academic researchers, educationalists, the media in non-commercial applications, and organisations such as language societies and individuals with a serious interest in historical dialect materials can freely download the corpus on completion of an access request form available at the website.
19CSC: A Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence
(information provided by Marina Dossena)
Compilers: Marina Dossena and Richard Dury (University of Bergamo, Italy)
Aim: 19CSC is expected to include a proportional quantity of both private and business letters, by male and female encoders. The aim is to have a total of at least 500,000 words: 250,000 from private correspondence and 250,000 from business correspondence. The texts included in the corpus are to be diplomatically transcribed from original manuscripts (or typescripts, in the case of later business letters). Lexico-grammatical tagging is envisaged at a later stage of the project.
Contact details: Prof. Marina Dossena, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Piazza Rosate 2 - 24129 Bergamo (Italy)
http://www.unibg.it/anglistica/slin/19CSC-home.html
OED online
(information provided by Anthony Esposito)
The new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (currently being published online in quarterly instalments) is the first full-scale revision for 100 years. Lists of historical forms are being thoroughly revised and greatly expanded. To enhance electronic searching each individual form is being tagged with all of its attributes (i.e. date, provenance label, grammatical label, register label, as appropriate).
For further information about OED Online see the website (http://www.oed.com/)
Scottish Language Dictionaries
(information provided by Christine Robinson)
Scottish Language Dictionaries is the national organisation for Scots historical lexicography. We have responsibility for the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) which brings together A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary and its New Supplement. We are currently revising the Concise Scots Dictionary and we engage in research, educational outreach at teaching all levels.