An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and a Morphological Analyzer of Old English

The main stages in the project of the digitization of the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller are described and the value of the resulting data is considered. The paper suggests that the dictionary data need to be structurally tagged if we are to further benefit from the project beyond the current dictionary application. It is also noted that the re-tagging process can be partially automatized, but that it will have its complications due to the ambiguity of typographical tagging currently included in the data. An outline of the development of an Old English morphological analyzer, now in its early stages, is offered using the valuable digitized data of the Dictionary and drawing on a model of a functional Czech morphological analyzer. Envisaged problems, such as the building of stem- and affix-lexicons, Old English vowel variation and stem-final variation, are discussed and several solutions are proposed. The paper also proposes and accounts for some divergence from the model of the Czech analyzer reflecting differences between Czech and Old English morphology and slight differences in the final uses of the Modern Czech and Old English analyzers. Finally, the analyzer’s future use, both as a part of the dictionary and as a stand-alone tool for parsing the corpora, for connecting the lexicon entries with text, etc., is suggested and some possibilities of future improvements, e.g. a word-formation or a syntactic analyzer, are indicated.