Greetings,
Now it is time to bring you up to date with what I have been doing with regard to this project. The obvious part of this is the articles which have been published on this blog about the various aspects of Elizabethan English. What is not known is what has been happening at about the same time.
I had indicated extracting words from Saviolo's (1595) His Practice in Two Bookes, well this was merely the beginning of gaining words from the appropriate period. I had considered only using sources of significance to the overall project, thus fencing manuals, but then decided that this would not provide the rounded picture that was required, thus I expanded my search.
Following Saviolo, I extracted words from Elizabeth
I (1591) Restitution of Goods Lately
Taken on the Seas, which is a statement to here parliament at the time discussing the returning of some goods taken from the Spanish during the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Thus this was an official document with the appropriate language associated.
Following Elizabeth I, was Marlowe (1598) Hero and Leander, clearly a play written by Christopher Marlowe. This was in order to further round out the language this being a poetry rather than prose as the previous two had been. This also allowed for words which would not have otherwise been found.
Next it was back to the fencing manuals with di Grassi (1594) His True Art of Defence, which of little surprise is another martial arts manual from the period, and one that I was interested in previously. This once again, supplied more technical language associated with the martial arts of the period, increasing that which was gained from Saviolo. With these four sources having had words collected from them an placed in an electronic form, it was suitable to start looking at a lexicon.
With regard to each source, each was recorded with the word from the Elizabethan period along with the modern, and organised by the modern spelling. There were words of significance which were used either in a different way, or are now simply absent from the language, these were noted and their meanings discovered to form the beginning of a glossary for these different and difficult words. This collection of definitions will also be included in the lexicon.
Collecting all the words from the four sources which have been indicated above resulted in a document of some 75-pages long with approximately 6,300 lexemes. This is only from four sources. In order to cover the entire time-span of Elizabeth's reign using the current method and doing it, for the most part alone, would take too much time. The result of this was a reduction in the scope and a focus on the 1590s rather than the entire Elizabethan period.
Most recently I have started extraction from Chettle (1592) Kind-Harts Dreame. Once again the same process will follow. Words will be extracted and placed with their modern counter-parts in a book in the order found in the source. Following this they are recorded alphabetically on single leaves of paper with all records of the spelling of that word. This is then transferred to an electronic medium and any different or difficult words are recorded and their meanings found. The final step is then to add them to the lexicon. This would seem like a slow process with faults associated, but it results in two records of the words on paper, and two in electronic form. This reduces the chance of losing the data collected.
The further updates to this project will no doubt be shorter than this one, and hopefully a little more frequent.
Cheers,
Henry.
No comments:
Post a Comment