Dictionaries--Linguistic Corpora and Text Collections--Manuscripts--Phonology
This site links to (mostly) free resources one can use to study the traditional periods in the life of the HEL. ; visit its companion, which focuses on more general linguistics. Brief descriptions are provided below the resources, which are organized as follows:
Dictionaries--Linguistic Corpora and Text Collections--Manuscripts--Phonology
From UToronto, Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, first printed in 1604, is generally regarded to be the first fully developed representative of the monolingual dictionary in English. For each of the 2543 headwords contained in its first edition, Cawdrey provided a concise definition -- the standard entry rarely exceeded more than a few words, usually synonyms -- and he marked those words thought to be of French or Greek origin; in some cases, he also marked those words which were a "kind of" a larger group. Cawdrey added material to each of its three later editions (1609, 1613, 1617), ultimately to define over 3200 words, but did not vary his method. While small and unsophisticated by today's standards, the Table was the largest dictionary of its type at the time and, when viewed in the full context of Early Modern English lexicography, it exemplifies the movement from words lists and glosses to dictionaries which more closely resemble those of today.
The largest historical English dictionary ever published, available online through the FLC library subscription. For now, the old school -- and still most hopeful, if heavier -- hardbound version is available in the FLC library.
From Project Bartleby, the online AHED contains over 90,000 entries feature 10,000 new words and senses, 70,000 audio word pronunciations, 900 full-page color illustrations, language notes and word-root appendixes.
Merriam-Webster can be considered the direct lexicographical heir of Noah Webster. In 1843, the company bought the rights to the 1841 edition of Webster's magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged. At the same time, they secured the rights to create revised editions of the work. M-W.com offers the word of the day, and the Open Dictionary (a la Urbandictionary.com) which allows users to submit the latest in lexical innovation.
This has some limitations in terms of total entries, but it raises some fundamental questions about words in our minds, and how we conceive of them, especially in relationship to more traditional thesauruses.
While the web itself is perhaps the largest corpus of written language available, here are some other searchable corpora, including some with recorded and transcribed spoken language. These are organized by period: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English, except for the venerable Oxford Text Archive, which contains texts from all periods..
Georgetown's extensive collection for Medieval Studies.
The text, and lots of other good info about one of the great masterpieces in English Literature.
This site provides materials for Harvard University's Chaucer classes in the Core Program, the English Department, and the Division of Continuing Education. (Others of course are welcome to use it.) It provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages. Of particular use are the Chaucerian English Pronunciation sites.
The Middle English Compendium has been designed to offer easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources.
This collection of Middle English texts was assembled from works contributed by University of Michigan faculty and from texts provided by the Oxford Text Archive, as well as works created specifically for the Corpus by the HTI. With almost 60 texts, the corpus grows constantly, and includes Chaucer, Malory and many others.
The Michigan Early Modern English Materials (MEMEM) were compiled by Richard W. Bailey, Jay L. Robinson, James W. Downer, with Patricia V. Lehman. The Materials consist of citations collected for the modal verbs and certain other English words for the Early Modern English Dictionary. Many of the slips used in the work were the original Oxford English Dictionary slips, provided to the University of Michigan by the editors of the OED.
The original electronic text for this version of the Bible was provided by the Oxford Text Archive. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible is copyright © National Council of Churches of Christ in America.
The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts is a collection of texts on various subject matter published between 1640 and 1740 - a time marked by the rise of mass publication, the development ofa public discourse in many areas of everyday life and, last but not least, the standardisation of British English.
An Online Repository of Works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799, this contains over 166 works, including Shakespeare, Spenser, and many more.
A series of old-spelling, SGML-encoded editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period.
The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. The written part (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. The spoken part (10%) includes a large amount of unscripted informal conversation, recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way, together with spoken language collected in all kinds of different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins. While FLC does not presently have access to the full corpus, you can do searches on-line, which will provide results of up to 50 hits. Like the OED, hopefully we'll have a subscription at some point.
The British Women Romantic Poet's Project is producing an online scholarly archive consisting of E-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women written (not necessarily published) between 1789 (the onset of the French Revolution) and 1832 (the passage of the Reform Act), a period traditionally known in English literary history as the Romantic period.
The Bank of English is a collection of samples of modern English language held on computer for analysis of words, meanings, grammar and usage.The latest release of the corpus amounted to 415 million words and it continues to grow with the constant addition of new material. Written texts come from newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, brochures, leaflets, reports, letters, and so on. The spoken word is represented by transcriptions of everyday casual conversation, radio broadcasts, meetings, interviews and discussions, etc. The material is up- to-date, with the majority of texts originating after 1990. This one also requires a subscription, but scroll down to the bottom portion "Can I use this resource?" to learn about the demos, including a great collocate search.
Documenting the American South (DAS) is a collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. It is organized into the following projects: First Person Narratives of the American South, Library of Southern Literature, North American Slave Narratives, The Southern Homefront, 1861-65, and The Church in the Southern Black Community. The next one, now in the planning stage, will feature North Caroliniana. The Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors DAS, and the texts come primarily from its Southern holdings. As of July 27, 2001, DAS includes 960 books and manuscripts. Most are accompanied by a full bibliographic record.
With over 60 English language newspapers published around the globe and dating back twenty years or more in some cases, this is another great resource for studying more recent English language usage. YouÕll need to be connected to FLCÕs network to use this. Word search tip: when searching for a word, also search for "a" or "the," as if it doesnÕt find your word in the first paragraph of an article, it will move to the next. "A" and "the" will help you get around this.
The Oxford Text Archive works closely with members of the Arts and Humanities
academic community to collect, catalogue, and preserve high-quality electronic
texts for research and teaching. The OTA currently distributes more than 2500
resources in over 25 different languages, and is actively working to extend
its catalogue of holdings. The OTA is one of the largest online text collections
The Bard's work online, for free. MIT's was the an early edition of the Complete
Works of William Shakespeare. But MIT had a meltdown, so you might try UVa's
site to search all of his plays at once.
The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate
transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded
using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). It is fully searchable,
and includes works by, among others, Harriet Martineau and Augusta Webster.
The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford provides this image of the
preface to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. They also offer lots of manuscript images
from this list.
Look around, especially if you have a fast connection.
This edition allows you to point-and-click your way to a better understanding
of one of the most important and powerful sermons of the Anglo-Saxon world.
The Sermon of the Wolf to the English was composed by Wulfstan II, Archbishop
of York and Bishop of Worcester, in approximately AD 1014, under the pseudonym
Lupus. Created between 1995-2000, this collection offers digital facsimiles of complete
manuscripts, scanned directly from the originals. This site provides access
to over 80 early manuscripts now in institutions associated with the University
of Oxford. An impressive -- and growing -- collection. Although some manuscript
facsimiles are incomplete, they're operating under the principle that "a nearly
complete manuscript is bettern than none at all." I couldn't agree more. Here's
a Table of Contents for MS 198: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
From the British Library's Online Information Server, this site has a couple
of beautiful reproductions of this manuscript. The Lindisfarne Gospels in the
British Library is one of Britain's greatest artistic treasures. Written and
illuminated in honour of God and St Cuthbert about AD 698 by the monk Eadfrith,
afterwards Bishop of Lindisfarne, it is famous for the superb quality and intricate
design of its decorated pages. Easily one of the best images of manuscripts
on the web.
The British Library has two complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible and a small but important fragment of a third copy. One copy, printed on paper, was transferred in 1829 to the British Library with the library of King George III (1738-1820), shelfmark: C.9.d.3,4 = IC.55. The other copy, printed on vellum, was bequeathed by Thomas Grenville (1755-1846), shelfmark: G.12226 = IC.56.
In March 2000, ten researchers and technical experts from Keio University in Tokyo and from NTT spent two weeks in The British Library creating digital images of the two Bibles and the other related items. The British Library is grateful for the support received from its Japanese partners.
The digitisation aims to provide: Wider access to material which needs to be protected from frequent handling;
High-quality substitutes for the original copies of the Bibles;
Improved conditions for comparison of the two copies. Designed for undergraduates, this site explains the basics of the GVS, complete
with moving IPA vowels and their sounds. It runs on an applet and requires Quicktime This Website is designed to help students of the English language trace the
development of the phonemes of English from the Old English period into Present-Day
English. The information contained in the site is available in any good textbook
on the history of the language, but printed texts normally present the information
in a linear fashion corresponding to the chronological development of English.
The value of the Website is the hypertextual treatment of the information, which
is meant to keep students from having to spend a great deal of time leafing
through textbooks. Yes, the home of the IPA, in all its glory. For information on the history
of the IPA, multiple charts and examples, and even fonts, this is the place.
TheyÕve also got a good list
of links for phonetics and linguistics online sources.
Curious about the sounds of Global English? Steven Weinberger at George Mason University has a collection of readings of a paragraph by English learners from around the world. Each of these 137 readings is transcribed with the IPA, so it is a great way to hear some of these sounds and learn to transcribe them. For some of them, there is also a list of "different" phonological rules that seem to be in use. Definitely spend some time here. TECH NOTE: Sometimes Internet Explorer doesn't pull up Quicktime as it should. If you can't get the archive to play, try Netscape, which seems to respond more consistently.
This is a great site, with the sounds of English included as sound files you
can listen to as you master phonetics and phonology, created and maintained
by the chair of my dissertation committee.
The Telsur Project is a survey of linguistic changes in progress in North American English, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is the creator of the Atlas of North American English [ANAE], (formerly, the Phonological Atlas of North America). The Atlas will be published in 2002 by Mouton/de Gruyter. It will be accompanied by a CD-ROM version developed by a team headed by Prof. Jürgen Handke at the University of Marburg, creators of The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology . The maps and analyses presented on these pages include early studies that provide the background of the Atlas, and new studies continue the work of the Atlas.
From Lord Spencer's Unique Imperfect Copy, Completed by the Original French And the Second English Version of 1595,
Edited by
Leon Kellner,
Published for THE EARLY ENGLISH TEXT SOCIETY by the OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO,
First Published 1890 Reprinted 1962. From the Introduction: "From the logician's point of view, every 'part of speech' has a province of its own, strictly limited and separated from the other 'parts'; but in practice, language constantly cuts the line drawn by Aristotle, and some English students are wont to say that nearly every short English noun and verb can be used as verb, noun, and adjective, while nearly every adjective can be used as a noun: 'a plant, plant-life or plant-culture, to plant; tea, tea-district, we'll tea you at our tent; love, love trifles, to love; his english, English ways, to english; the true, the beautiful; true that line,' &c.;" This contains chapters on the Syntax of the Parts of Speech, Syntax of the Sentence, Arrangement of Words, and an Appendix which discusses Caxton's work as a translator. This classic was written to clarify the discrepancies between British and American
English and to define the distinguishing characteristics of American English.
Mencken¹s groundbreaking study was undoubtedly the most scientific linguistic
work on the American language to date and continues to serve as a definitive
resource in the field. Asserting that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference
book is a must-have for any student and conscientious writer. Intended for use
in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature,
it gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style and
concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most
commonly violated. An American South grammar published during the Civil War, Branson's grammar
book is a descendant of Lowth and Murray and a predecessor to more contemporary
composition handbooks. Be sure to look at his guidelines for punctuation. The plan for the second edition of the classic reference work The King¹s English
was dictated by the following considerations: (1) to pass by all rules, of whatever
absolute importance, that are shown by observation to be seldom or never broken;
and (2) to illustrate by living examples, with the name of a reputable authority
attached to each, all blunders that observation shows to be common. Another Confederate Grammar from UNC's Documenting the American South. From
the Preface: "THE political revolution in which we are now engaged makes necessary
an intellectual one. To aid in this, and to supply an existing want, I have
undertaken the preparation of a series of ENGLISH GRAMMARS, of which this is
the first."
A vigorous assessment of how our language is best written and spoken and how we can use it most effectively, this guide is the ideal handbook of language etiquette: friendly, sensible, reliable, and fun to read. Its 6,500 entries contain thousands of examples, both descriptive and prescriptive, and feature 4,300 hyperlinked cross-references.
With a detailed look at grammar, style, diction, word formation, gender, social groups and scientific forms, this valuable reference work is ideal for students, writers, academicians and anybody concerned about proper writing style. Peter Roget’s classic structure coupled with Mawson’s modernization becomes even more user-friendly on Bartleby.com with 85,000 hyperlinked cross-references—thus fulfilling their goal of “each word being related to its neighbors and each part to the whole.” Additionally, over 2,900 proverbs and quotations from classic and modern authors illustrate the 1,000-plus entries. Geoff Nunberg
is a breath of linguistic fresh air, especially since he continually offers
linguistic knowledge to the non-linguist public. Here's a good example of a
word history paper, his history of terrorism. 14 aug 01; and again 23 aug 03; 22 july 08
Brad Benz, Fort Lewis College
Thanks to my former profs Anne Curzan
and George Dillon, whose
lists will look very similar to mine.
email: benz_b@fortlewis.edu
The Complete Works of Shakespeare,
MIT; see also UVa's Shakespeare
Site
Victorian Women Writers Project
Manuscripts and Translations
Anglo Saxon Chronicle Preface
The
Electronic Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, Melissa J. Bernstein, URochester
Early Manuscripts at Oxford University
The Lindisfarne
Gospels
Gutenberg Bible, Online MS Images from the British Library
Phonetics and Phonology
The Great Vowel Shift, Melissa Menzer, Furman U.
The History of English
Phonemes, William E. Rogers, Furman U
The International Phonetic
Alphabet Association
Speech Accent Archive, Steven
Weinberger, George Mason
Resources for Studying Spoken English, George L. Dillon, UWashington
TELSUR Project: Atlas of North American English, UPenn
Assorted Historical English Grammar and Usage Guides
Caxton's Blanchardyn and Eglantine c. 1489
The American Language, HL Mencken,
1921
The Elements of Style, William
Strunk, Jr., 1918
First Book in Composition
Applying the Principles of Grammar to the Art of Composing, Levi Branson,
1863
The King's English, HW Fowler,
1908
Our Own Primary
Grammar for the Use of Beginners, Charles W. Smythe, 1861
Columbia Guide to Standard American English, Kenneth G. Wilson
The American Heritage Book of English Usage
Roget's International Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, C.O. Sylvester Mawson, 1922
Other Links
