A Supplement to the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language

爱尔兰拥有中世纪世界中最丰富和最广泛的白话文学之一，可以追溯到6世纪，包括世俗和宗教材料和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爱尔兰皇家学院的爱尔兰语言词典，主要以旧爱尔兰语和中爱尔兰语为基础，在1913年至1976年间以23本单独的分册出版。它是爱尔兰最权威和最全面的词典，收录了43,110个词条，被广泛认为对凯尔特人和中世纪的爱尔兰学术具有极其重要的意义。阿尔斯特大学的工作人员自2003年以来一直在制作原始词典的电子版，这项工作将于2007年3月完成。这一备受期待的版本代表着爱尔兰学术的真正进步，因为由于旧爱尔兰语和中爱尔兰语的复杂性质及其非标准拼写系统，纸质词典的使用是出了名的困难。该小组现在提议，通过纳入自第一个分册出现以来出版的学术更正和增补，使电子词典的文本保持最新。目前，彻底修订这本词典是不切实际的，可能需要长达50年的时间才能完成。因此，拟议的项目将采用一种更简单、不那么详尽的方法。它将收集过去70年来由其他学者在期刊和已发表版本的文本中发表的修订和增补。然后，他们将在数字文本中输入更正、添加和进一步的参考，产生一个最新的、适合21世纪学术目的的版本。随着工作的进展，将在网上公布修订版本，作为对现有电子词典的补充，以便学者可以立即获得项目的结果。反馈功能将允许感兴趣的用户输入对修订和未修订条目的评论，以便他们能够为更全面和更具权威性的最后版本做出贡献。在项目结束时，所有修订版本都将作为该项目工作的永久记录出现在《词典》的单独硬拷贝附录中。通过将电子词典的功能性和多功能性与对早期爱尔兰词典学的最新研究相结合，修订版将成为与中世纪爱尔兰有关的所有领域的学者不可或缺的工具，包括语言学家、历史学家、文本学者、考古学家、民俗学家、印欧学者以及比较文学和宗教学者。修订后的词典将对非专家和来自相关领域的学者特别有用，他们可能不完全熟悉爱尔兰词典学的学术进展。即使是研究早期爱尔兰语言和文学的专家也可能不会在他们自己的词典中有详尽的注释，这个修订版将为他们提供一个全面的和现代的中世纪爱尔兰语词典。

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.