A Morphological Dictionary of Old Norse and a Reverse Dictionary of Old Norse. An interdisciplinary research project in historical linguistics

 
This project provides a database of the lingua franca of the Baltic Region prior to Hanse times that will enable researchers in Medieval Scandinavian linguistics to study the principles of Old Norse word formation in detail and allow them to investigate systematically how word formation changed between the 12^th and the 15^th centuries. In order to achieve this aim the database has to be comprehensive and provide morphological information on the lemmata.
 
The database is intended to contain the complete vocabulary of Old Norse as presented in various dictionaries mainly compiled in the 19th century. It covers the general vocabulary occurring in practically all dictionaries, the genre-specific vocabulary of poetry as well as the more peripheral terminology used in legal texts, theological or medical treatises and the like.
 
Both graphic and grammatical problems arose during our compilation, for there is neither a chronologically or geographically fixed norm common to all dictionaries, nor do lexicographers always agree on the word-class assigned to a particular lemma. Therefore a norm had to be decided on covering all entries in the database. A further inconsistency occurs in compound words; different dictionaries prefer differing stems or cases in the first parts of compounds or differing linking morphemes. Another challenge are names; they often seem to follow rules of their own and offer a plethora of allomorphs not occurring otherwise.  Some 300,000 entries were thus compiled and can be manipulated semi-automatically.
 
The morphological analysis of the lemmata is not only done on the Old Norse surface, but carried further to Germanic deep-structure and even beyond using encoding procedures that allow to retrieve elements that became extinct or ceased to be productive in word formation. Etymological dictionaries – some of which are machine-readable – had to be used intensively.
 
Our database includes the large standard dictionaries of Old Norse that were compiled independently such as Richard Cleasby / Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, Oxford 1869-1874; Leiv Heggstad / Finn Hødnebø / Erik Simensen, Norrøn ordbok, Oslo 1975; Walter Baetke, Wörterbuch zur altnordischen Prosaliteratur, Berlin 1965-1968.
 
The morphemes we segmented owe much to the relevant etymological dictionaries such as Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, Íslensk orðsifjabók, Reykjavík 1989; Frank Heidermanns, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der germanischen Primäradjektive, Berlin 1993; Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Leiden ²1962.
 
In September 2005 a conference on morphology in the medieval Germanic, Baltic and Finnish languages was held in Greifswald where several aspects of the project were presented. The conference papers were published in the Supplement series to NOWELE in 2007 in Odense, Denmark.
 
Project director: Prof. Dr. Hans Fix-Bonner (Ernst Moritz Arndt University)
 
Duration: 2004 to 2007
 
 
Further information and downloads:
Information flyer on the project (german)