Odd Einar Haugen

Parallel Views: Multi-level Encoding of Medieval Nordic Primary Sources

This article discusses three principal types of transcription with reference to vernacular Medieval Nordic sources: a facsimile transcription with graphic details, a diplomatic transcription with few graphic details, but with all phonemic distinctions upheld, and a normalized transcription with regularized orthography. The article argues that all three levels of transcription can be accommodated in a single multi-level encoding, using the flexibility of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Special characters and abbreviation marks are encoded using entities and linking these to Unicode characters, partly in the Private Use Area. Words are encoded on one or more levels using specified elements and supplied with lexicographical and grammatical information by way of attributes. Display in various formats such as HTML and PDF is managed by stylesheets. Thus, a single XML file allows for several views of the text, suitable for different user groups, such as linguists, historians, and literary critics.

The silva portentosa of stemmatology: Bifurcation in the recension of Old Norse manuscripts

After his first edition of the Old French text Lai de l’Ombre in 1890, the Romance scholar Joseph Bedier returned to the text in a revised edition in 1913. In the introduction to this edition, he claimed that he had become aware of a strange law: the great majority of stemmata proposed for Old French texts were bifurcating, i.e. they had two main branches. When he once more returned to this question in 1928, he claimed that of 110 stemmata he had encountered, 105 were bifurcating. Arrigo Castellani, another Romance scholar, revised this material in 1957, and came to somewhat lower numbers, but confirmed in general Bedier’s conclusion—of 86 stemmata, Castellani found that 71 were bifurcating. This article is an investigation into another vernacular tradition, the Old Norse one, i.e. Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. The material presented here is based on the two major series published in Copenhagen, Bibliotheca Arnamagnaeana and Editiones Arnamagnaeanae , and it comes very close to the findings of Castellani—of 89 stemmata, 74 turned out to be bifurcating. The two main hypotheses of Bedier are evaluated, and the conclusion is that the most likely explanation for the preponderance of bifurcating stemmata is the force of dichotomy inherent in the procedure of the stemmatic recension.

Altnordische Philologie : Norwegen und Island

Einleitung 1: Odd Einar Haugen Einleitung 2: Astrid van Nahl Jon Gunnar Jorgensen: Handschriften- und Archivkunde Odd Einar Haugen: Textkritik und Textphilologie Karin Fjellhammer Seim: Runologie Odd Einar Haugen: Palaographie Else Mundal: Edda und Skaldendichtung Else Mundal: Sagaliteratur -Marit Christoffersen: Syntaktische Entwicklungen Inge Saerheim: Personen- und Ortsnamen Jan Ragnar Hagland: Altislandisch und Altnorwegisch Endre Morck: Mittelnorwegisch Bibliographie Abbildungsverzeichnis Indices.

The PROIEL treebank family: a standard for early attestations of Indo-European languages

This article describes a family of dependency treebanks of early attestations of Indo-European languages originating in the parallel treebank built by the members of the project pragmatic resources in old Indo-European languages. The treebanks all share a set of open-source software tools, including a web annotation interface, and a set of annotation schemes and guidelines developed especially for the project languages. The treebanks use an enriched dependency grammar scheme complemented by detailed morphological tags, which have proved sufficient to give detailed descriptions of these richly inflected languages, and which have been easy to adapt to new languages. We describe the tools and annotation schemes and discuss some challenges posed by the various languages that have been annotated. We also discuss problems with tokenisation, sentence division and lemmatisation, commonly encountered in ancient and mediaeval texts, and challenges associated with low levels of standardisation and ongoing morphological and syntactic change.