The Edinburgh Historical Linguistic Atlases & Text Corpora: Early Middle English and Older Scots (1)

The principal aims of the project are to produce two historical linguistic atlases: A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150-1300 (LAME) and A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots phase I 1380-1500 (LAOS). These atlases follow 'A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English' (LALME, McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986). In the periods covered by these atlases, neither English nor Scots were written in a standard form. Written forms are characterized by variation – different spellings of ‘the same’ word or morpheme. Variants often show geographical patterning. Certain kinds of text can be localized on non-linguistic criteria — often ‘local documents’, i.e. Charters, court and council books. Such texts provide the basic distribution of material on maps. Into this can be interpolated other texts without explicit non-linguistic associations, using the 'fit'-technique to localize assemblages of linguistic data by a process of progressive elimination. LAEME and LAOS differ from LALME in that they are based on corpora of fully transcribed texts in which each word and morpheme has been lexico-grammatically tagged. The corpora will be complemented by auxiliary data-sets, including a Corpus of Etymologies and Corpus of Change. It is envisaged that LAEME and LAOS will be produced as electronic atlases on CDs with accompanying books to explain the theory and methodology.