Germanic Etymologies

Intensifying Prefixes in the Etymologies

The Etymologies (as found in The Lost Road and in the “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies” published in Vinyar Tengwar 45 and 46) include several examples of forms that are denoted as “intensified” by Tolkien, among them those that are formed by a prefix. The entry A‐ (VT45:5) is perhaps the best starting point for a classification of these intensified forms. We learn there of an intensi...

Cladistic Methodology and West Germanic

For about a century and a half now one of the usual tasks of historical linguistics has been reconstructing the prehistory of linguistic communities. (That is, of course, the side of reconstruction that non-linguists are interested in.) A perennial question is what sort of model of linguistic diversification best fits the data. This paper will explore that question in the light of data supporti...

New Technologies for Old Germanic. Resources and Research on Parallel Bibles in Older Continental Western Germanic

We provide an overview of on-going efforts to facilitate the study of older Germanic languages currently pursued at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. We describe created resources, such as a parallel corpus of Germanic Bibles and a morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Old High German (OHG) and Old Saxon, a lexicon of OHG in XML and a multilingual etymological database. We discuss NLP...

Latin Etymologies as Features on BNC Text Categorization

This paper presents an early experimental work on BNC Text Categorization (TC) with Latin etymologies as features, emphasis on spoken and written texts. Two aims achieved in this study: (1) to explore discriminative new linguistic features rather than lots of noise-bringing “bag-of-words” (BoW). (2) to build up a base step to represent texts in distinct types of linguistic features with differe...

Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax