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The computer and Middle English dialectology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

H. M. Logan
H. M. Logan*
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
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Extract

The attitude of many humanists toward the computer may be suggested by the reply of the ultimate computer to the ultimate question “Is there a God?” “There is now,” it clicked in reply. To anyone who knows anything at all about computers, this is simply funny; but many humanists take it seriously. They look upon the mighty works and despair. But whatever else it may be, the devilish device is certainly useful for linguistic work. Among its other uses, the computer has been applied with some success to produce concordances of poems, including a concordance of Middle English poems by the “Pearl” poet. It has also been applied to the statistical analysis of Modern English. These two applications of the computer may be combined to solve several problems in the recent approach to Middle English dialectology developed by Angus McIntosh and Michael Samuels.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Fall 1967 , pp. 37 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1967

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Footnotes

*

This paper is based on a speech delivered at the annual meeting of the C.L.A. at Ottawa, 17 June 1967.

References

1 The first computerized concordance was that of Parrish, S. M., A Concordance to the Poems of Matthew Arnold (Ithaca, N.Y., 1959)Google Scholar; the first ME concordance was that of Kottler, B. and Markman, A. M., A Concordance to Five Middle English Poems (Pittsburgh, 1966)Google Scholar.

2 Roberts, A. H., A Statistical Linguistic Analysis of American English (The Hague, 1965)Google Scholar. [To this the author would wish to add the following work which had not been published when his article was submitted: Kučera, Henry and Francis, W. Nelson, Computational Analysis of Present-Day English, with a forward by Twaddell, W. F. and an analytical essay by Carroll, John B. (Providence, R.I., 1967; publ, date Dec. 15).—EDITOR]Google Scholar

3 McIntosh described the approach in “A New Approach to ME Dialectology,” ES 44 (1963), pp. 1-11; Samuels illustrates it in “Some Applications of ME Dialectology,” ES 44 (1963), pp. 81-94.

4 Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature (Ann Arbor, 1935), pp. 1-60, hereinafter abbreviated MEDC.

5 d’Ardenne, S. T. R. O., An Edition of þe Liflade and te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene (Paris, 1936), p. 184 Google Scholar.

6 ‘The Index of the Vernon Manuscript,” MLR 32 (1937), p. 225.

7 Brunner, Karl, An Outline of Middle English Grammar, transi, by Johnston, G. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 60 Google Scholar.

8 Campbell, A., Old English Grammar (Oxford, 1959), pp. 88-89 Google Scholar.

9 þe Wohunge of Ure Laucrd, EETS, OS 241 (1958), p. lv.

10 The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. Einenkel, E., EETS, OS 80 (1884)Google Scholar, 1. 1941 (Royal Text). All references to St. Katherine are to this edition.

11 Tolkien, J. R. R., “ ‘Ancrene Wisse’ and ‘Hali Meiðhad,’ ” E & S 14 (1929), pp. 104-20 Google Scholar.

12 See especially her “The Dialect of the Corpus Manuscript of the ‘Ancrene Riwle,’ “ London Medieval Studies 1 (1938), pp. 225-48; “Dialects of the West Midlands,” RES 3 (1927), pp. 54-67,186-203,319-31.

13 The complete results appear in my dissertation, “The Dialect of the ‘Life of St. Katherine’ : A Linguistic Study” (diss. Univ. of Penna., 1966).

14 Brunner, , Outline, pp. 36-37 Google Scholar; Luick, K., Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, re-ed. by Wild, F. and Koziol, H. (Stuttgart, 1964), p. 948 Google Scholar; Jordan, R., Handbuch der mittelenglischen Grammatik (Heidelberg, 1925), p. 145 Google Scholar.

15 A set of computer programs that may make this possible is being developed by Glickman, R. J. and is discussed by him in “Printing, Analyzing, and Indexing Literary Texts by Computer,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Computer Society of Canada, 7, 4 (Summer 1967), pp. 20-21 Google Scholar.