The use of IT to explore the development of languages has become one of the most exciting areas of modern linguistics, and it is now possible to compile large datasets which enable us to trace the history of languages and compare them in a way we were not able to do in the past.
The three-year ESRC/AHRC funded GerManC project, led by Professor Martin Durrell and Dr Paul Bennett of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, with Silke Scheible and Jason Whitt as post-doc researchers. It will be the first fully representative corpus of Early Modern German (1650-1800), when the language was developing from regional varieties into a national language. In developing linguistic software, the project is collaborating extensively and exchanging programs with researchers in Britain, Germany and elsewhere.
The project has attracted much international interest, and hosted a conference at Chancellors on 29-30 April which was attended by nearly 60 colleagues from 10 countries, who gave 24 papers on historical corpus projects on a wide range of languages, from Latin and Old Saxon to Catalan, Luxemburgish and Slovene, with plenary papers by colleagues from Berlin and Helsinki, as well as Prof. David Dension of SLLC.
The conference was a great success (helped by splendid weather); Prof. Peter Gilles from Luxembourg wrote “a very warm Merci to Mancunian colleagues for organizing this for me very inspiring conference! The combination of technical aspects and presentation of corpus work will help us a lot with our project. E schéine Bonjour!”