A Supplement to the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language

爱尔兰拥有中世纪世界中最丰富、最广泛的本土文学之一，其历史可以追溯到第六世纪，包括世俗和宗教材料以及无与伦比的叙事故事。研究中世纪爱尔兰文学的学生和学者的主要工具是皇家爱尔兰学院的《爱尔兰语词典》，该词典主要基于古爱尔兰语和中爱尔兰语，于1913年至1976年间作为23个独立的分册出版。它是最权威和最全面的爱尔兰语词典，包含43，110个条目，并被广泛认为对凯尔特和中世纪爱尔兰学术非常重要。自2003年以来，阿尔斯特大学的工作人员一直致力于原版词典的数字版，工作将于2007年3月完成。这一期待已久的版本代表了爱尔兰学术界的真实的进步，因为由于旧爱尔兰语和中爱尔兰语的复杂性及其非标准拼写系统，纸质词典是出了名的难以使用。该小组现在提议，通过纳入自第一卷分册出版以来发表的学术更正和增补，使电子词典的文本保持最新。对这部词典进行彻底的修订在这个时候是不切实际的，可能需要长达50年的时间才能完成。因此，拟议项目将采用一种较简单、不那么详尽的方法。它将收集过去七十年来其他学者在期刊和出版的文本版本中发表的修订和补充。然后，他们将在数字文本中输入更正、添加和进一步引用，从而产生一个当前版本，并适合于二十一世纪的学术目的。随着工作的进展，修订版将在网上公布，作为现有电子词典的补充，以便学者能够立即获得项目成果。反馈功能将使感兴趣的用户能够对订正和未经订正的条目发表评论，以便他们能够为更全面和更权威的最后版本作出贡献。在项目结束时，所有修订版将作为该词典的单独硬拷贝增补，作为项目工作的永久记录。通过将电子词典的功能和多功能性与早期爱尔兰词典学的最新研究相结合，修订版将成为研究中世纪爱尔兰所有领域的学者，包括语言学家，历史学家，文本学者，考古学家、民俗学家、印欧学家以及比较文学和宗教学者。修订后的词典将特别有用的非专家和学者从盟军领域谁可能不完全熟悉爱尔兰词典学的学术进展。即使是专家在早期爱尔兰语言和文学可能不会有详尽的注释在自己的字典和这个修订版将为他们提供一个全面的和当前的词汇中世纪爱尔兰。

Ireland possesses one of the richest and most extensive vernacular literatures in the medieval world stretching back as far as the sixth century, comprising both secular and religious material and an unparalleled body of narrative tales. The primary tool for students and scholars of medieval Irish literature has been the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish, which was published as 23 separate fascicles between 1913 and 1976. It is the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of Irish, containing 43,110 entries, and is widely considered of immense importance to Celtic and medieval Irish scholarship. Staff at the University of Ulster have been working on a digital edition of the original dictionary since 2003 and work is due to be completed in March 2007. This eagerly awaited edition represents a real advance for Irish scholarship as the paper Dictionary is notoriously difficult to use owing to the complex nature of Old and Middle Irish language and its non-standard spelling systems. The team now proposes to bring the text of the electronic Dictionary up to date by incorporating scholarly corrections and additions published since the first fascicles appeared. A thorough revision of the dictionary is impractical at this time and could take up to fifty years to complete. Therefore, the proposed project will adopt a simpler, less exhaustive approach. It will gather revisions and additions published over the last seventy years by other scholars in journals and published editions of texts. They will then enter corrections, additions and further references into the digital text, producing an edition which is current and fit for purpose for twenty-first century scholarship. Revisions will be published online as a supplement to the existing electronic dictionary as work progresses so that the results of the project will be immediately available to scholars. A feedback function will allow interested users to enter comments on both revised and unrevised entries so that they can contribute to a more comprehensive and authoritative final edition. At the conclusion of the project, all revisions will appear as a separate hard-copy supplement to the Dictionary as a permanent record of the project's work.By combining the functionality and versatility of the electronic dictionary with the latest research into early Irish lexicography, the revised edition will be an indispensable tool to scholars working in all areas associated with medieval Ireland including linguists, historians, textual scholars, archaeologists, folklorists, Indo-Europeanists, and scholars of comparative literature and religion. The revised Dictionary will be particularly useful to non-specialists and academics from allied fields who may not be fully acquainted with scholarly advances in Irish lexicography. Even specialists in early Irish language and literature will probably not have exhaustive annotations in their own dictionaries and this revised edition will provide them with ready access to a comprehensive and current lexicon of medieval Irish.