About the corpus of Old Frisian

Compiled and annotated by Rita van de Poel, Leiden University.
For more information about using this website consult the PDF help file.

Overview, July 2019

The Corpus Oudfries/Old Frisian contains a large sample of the Old Frisian language from ca. 1200-1550, which has been lemmatized and PoS-tagged by Rita van de Poel as part of her PhD research. The corpus can be searched on three linguistic levels: words (as occurring in the text witness), lemmata and/or part-of-speech. The corpus has also been enriched with metadata (like dialect, region, date) made accessible through filtering and grouping options.
At this point in time the corpus Old Frisian contains 235,462 tokens, 177 text witnesses from 11 manuscripts (114 distinct texts).

Acknowledgments

This website was developed by the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. The corpus search is powered by BlackLab, an open source corpus retrieval engine allowing fast and complex searches on large volumes of annotated text. Special thanks go out to Jesse de Does at IvdNT for his invaluable assistance. The corpus has been annotated in Cobalt, an application also developed by the IvdNT in which the complete lemmata list from the Altfriesisches Handwörterbuch (Heidelberg, 2008) edited by Hofmann & Popkema has been pre-loaded and its lemmata were used as the basis for the corpus. Anne Popkema has kindly provided the original dictionary database. Finally, I want to thank Eduard Drenth of the Fryske Akademy for writing several scripts enabling me to transform the texts.

Introduction into medieval Frisia

In the late Middle Ages the Frisian lands in the northern coastal regions in the Netherlands and Germany were only nominally ruled by the counts from Holland and Saxony. In practice the Frisians managed to ward off feudal overlords from exercising their power. The Frisian lands developed their own legal system in which the community of free men was responsible for judicial decisions. The legal system was based upon Germanic customary laws and relied very much on vengeance culture. Codifying their legal customs was not only a means of preserving their customs and rulings but also an important instrument in promoting their rights to self-governance. The vernacular language in which these customary laws were written down is Old Frisian, a West-Germanic language closely related to Old English. The textual witnesses in Old Frisian that remain today were written down between 1200 and 1550 and the texts that have been preserved are mostly legal in nature, with only very few samples of different genres.
The majority of Old Frisian texts are older than the manuscripts in which they can be found and the versions of the textual witnesses can differ markedly from each other. The largest part of the corpus of Old Frisian can be found in about 16 manuscripts (some of them being transcripts of original manuscripts). Most of the manuscripts have been transcribed and published and I have used these editions as the basis for my corpus.
If you are inexperienced in medieval Frisian and its language I recommend reading Rolf Bremmer's textbook, An Introduction to Old Frisian. History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary (Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 2009).

PhD project at Leiden University

The present Internet application is one of the results of my (on-going) PhD research. The objective of my PhD research is to examine the functions of kinship and marriage in late medieval Frisian society as gleaned from the Old Frisian customary laws. My research will take a corpus-based approach exploring the ways in which these conceptual fields KINSHIP and MARRIAGE were expressed in the Old Frisian language. Additionally, I am also interested in the usefulness of corpus linguistics in historical semantics. Will it prove to be an asset to the study of lexico-semantic research of Old Frisian? My research employs corpus-based analyses of meaning in context, i.e. collocations, near synonymy.
Obviously, a representative and annotated corpus is a necessity to be able to conduct corpus-based analyses. But since such a corpus was lacking for Old Frisian my first goal was to compile a representative corpus of Old Frisian. The current corpus of Old Frisian has been tailored to the specific needs of my research (having been lemmatised and enriched with basic Part-of-Speech tags) but it can be put to use for many other kinds of research. Please read the information on the design choices I made when annotating the texts for the corpus, before conducting your own explorations. Undoubtedly, I have made annotation errors, so I would appreciate any feedback! Please do not hesitate to contact me with any remarks or questions you may have.

Contact

Rita van de Poel: g.i.van.de.poel@hum.leidenuniv.nl