Text and Meaning: Contributions to a Revised Dictionary of Medieval Irish

在苏格兰西部和爱尔兰，盖尔语是这些岛屿上古老的凯尔特语的残余，至今仍在以不间断的传统继续使用。盖尔语是中世纪世界中最古老和最丰富的白话文献之一，可以追溯到6世纪。大量材料历久弥新，保存在爱尔兰、英国和欧洲大陆的图书馆里。它包含了从7世纪到17世纪的各种材料，包括世俗法律文本、对天堂和地狱的宗教探索、对世界历史的描述、精美的诗歌和一系列世界上无与伦比的叙事故事。这些文本是用早期形式的盖尔语写成的，如果没有几代编辑、翻译和解释这些文本的学者的努力，即使是现代盖尔语使用者也很难理解。解释这些文本的主要工具是爱尔兰皇家学院的爱尔兰语言词典，从1913年开始出版，直到1976年结束，共23卷。这部完整的词典长达2000多页，收录了超过3.5万个词条。它是最权威和最全面的爱尔兰语词典，被广泛认为对世界各地的凯尔特人和爱尔兰人的学术具有极其重要的意义。不幸的是，这部词典的绝大多数已经有40到100年的历史了，很多词条都已经过时了。拟议的项目将通过审查《词典》原始编纂者无法获得的100个新的文本版本来解决这一问题。在许多情况下，这些文本是编制者完全不知道的，而在其他情况下，较新和更权威的版本则超过了先前的努力。该项目将发现以前未被记录的词语，剔除幽灵词语，并提出新的或修订的定义，从而为学者们提供比以往任何时候都更全面和更权威的资料来源，这将对未来几十年新的文本学术的质量产生重大影响。近年来，项目工作人员在词典中加入了Griogchan(星座)、indladad(纵容)和ainmec(无酒精)等词汇，以及从法语和英语中借用的词汇，如Crosboga(十字弓)。研究还发现了一些偶尔具有讽刺意味的事情，比如互联网，这是现代爱尔兰语中互联网的意思，原来它的意思是“陷阱”。2007年，由美国人权委员会资助的电子版《词典》问世，出版了电子版(www.Dil.ie)。这使得与中世纪爱尔兰和苏格兰有关的所有领域的学者，包括语言学家、历史学家、考古学家、考古学家、民俗学家、印欧学者以及比较文学和宗教学者，更容易接触到它。新修订的词典将包含许多与农业、医学、法律、音乐、宗教和社会有关的新信息，这些信息将引起国内外历史学家和考古学家的特别兴趣，并将追溯一千年来词语的起源和发展。该词典将在网上发布，并将在移动设备上免费提供一个版本。普通用户将能够订阅“每日一词”，向他们介绍早期语言中一些更重要的单词和概念。《词典》丰富的词汇已经成熟，可供现代语言的创造性作家和思想家使用，项目工作人员将与作家、翻译家和术语学家合作，使他们能够通过积极参与早期语言的活动，重振现代盖尔语的词汇，这些语言在19世纪遭受边缘化和贫困。

In western Scotland and Ireland, Gaelic languages which are remnants of the ancient Celtic languages of these islands, continue to be spoken in an unbroken tradition down to the present day. There exists in Gaelic one of the oldest and richest vernacular literatures in the medieval world stretching back to the sixth century. A vast body of material has survived through the ages and is preserved in libraries in Ireland, Britain and continental Europe. It contains a wide range of material dating from the 7th to the 17th centuries including secular law texts, religious explorations of Heaven and Hell, accounts of the history of the world, exquisite poetry and a body of narrative tales unparalleled anywhere in the world. These texts are written in earlier forms of Gaelic and would be largely impenetrable even to modern Gaelic speakers without the work of generations of scholars who have edited, translated and interpreted the texts.The primary tool for the interpretation of these texts has been the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language, which was published as 23 separate volumes starting in 1913 and ending in 1976. The completed dictionary runs to over 2000 pages and contains over 35,000 entries. It is the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of Irish and is widely considered of immense importance to Celtic and Irish scholarship around the world. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Dictionary is now between 40 and 100 years old and many entries are well out of date. The proposed project will address this problem by examining 100 new textual editions that were not available to the original compilers of the Dictionary. In many cases these are texts that were completely unknown to the compilers while in other cases more recent and more authoritative editions have surpassed earlier efforts. The project will uncover previously unrecorded words, excise ghost words and suggest new or revised definitions, thereby providing scholars with a more comprehensive and authoritative source than was ever available before, and this will have significant impact on the quality of new textual scholarship for decades to come. In recent years, project staff have added words such as griogchan 'constellation', indladad 'pampering', and ainmesc 'alcohol free', to the Dictionary, as well as borrowings from French and English such as crosboga 'crossbow'. Research has also turned up occasional ironies, such as idirlion, the Modern Irish word for 'Internet', which is shown to have originally meant 'trap'.The Dictionary was brought into the 21st century in 2007 with the publication, funded by the AHRC, of an electronic edition (www.dil.ie). This made it much more accessible to scholars working in all areas associated with medieval Ireland and Scotland including linguists, historians, textual scholars, archaeologists, folklorists, Indo-Europeanists, and scholars of comparative literature and religion. The new revised Dictionary will contain much new information on words relating to agriculture, medicine, law, music, religion and society that will be of particular interest to historians and archaeologists nationally and internationally, and will trace the origin and development of words over a period of a thousand years. The Dictionary will be published online and a version will be made freely available for mobile devices. The general user will be able to subscribe to 'Word of the Day' which will introduce them to some of the more significant words and concepts in the early language. The rich vocabulary of the Dictionary is ripe for exploitation by creative writers and thinkers in the modern languages, and project staff will collaborate with authors, translators and terminologists to enable them to reinvigorate the vocabulary of the modern Gaelic languages, which suffered marginalisation and impoverishment in the 19th century, through active engagement with the earlier language.