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FORINFRA-Nasj.sats. forskn.infrastrukt

Digital corpus and dictionary of Norwegian Medieval Latin

Alternative title: Digitalt korpus og ordbok over norsk middelalderlatin

Awarded: NOK 7.8 mill.

Latin was Europe's common written language for a thousand years after it had ceased to be someone's mother tongue. Latin was spoken and written in the Norwegian Middle Ages. The project establishes a digital text bank of Norwegian Latin texts until the Reformation. The text bank provides a basis for a concordance which is a useful tool for creating a dictionary of Norwegian medieval Latin, which is the project's central goal. Latin is sometimes mixed into mother tongue texts, and there are many examples of interesting new words and new meanings of words adapted to Norwegian social and material reality. It is a national challenge to cover Latin in Norwegian texts lexicographically and make it available to researchers at home and abroad, whether their approach is linguistic, linguistic, cultural-historical or it is the political or literary or religious content that interests. The Norwegian medieval Latin dictionary is a piece in a large European project where the individual countries contribute their share.

MIDLAT aims at creating a research infrastructure for the study of Latin as used in Norway in the Middle Ages. This is part of a larger, European initiative to document Latin as the common language of Europe in this period. To achieve this, we will first digitize all the Norwegian Medieval texts that contain Latin. This will be done as part of Nasjonalbiblioteket's effort to digitize the Norwegian textual heritage. In a later step, automatic methods will be used to separate Latin parts of the texts from Old Norse parts. The Latin material will then be lemmatized and organized in a concordance. The digital corpus, lemmatization and concordance will in themselves constitute important resources for the study of Norwegian Medieval Latin, but also serve as stepping stones toward the ultimate goal of the project, which is a digital dictionary of Norwegian Latin.

Funding scheme:

FORINFRA-Nasj.sats. forskn.infrastrukt

Funding Sources