An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them

Searching the Traces of Middle Low German in Latvian Proper Names

The great impact of Middle Low German on the Latvian language during the 13–16th century is a well-known and rather widely researched fact. However, the main focus of linguists' attention has so far been on the apellative vocabulary. This article therefore aims to highlight the traces of Middle Low German on Latvian proper names – placenames and personal names (both first names and surnames) – during the time of their appearance and also nowadays (also touching upon the issue of onyms that have disappeared during previous centuries). The system of Latvian personal names (as the ancient Baltic two-stem personal names gradually disappeared during the 13–14th century), was largely built on the basis of Christian names in their Middle Low German versions. Among these Latvian names, borrowed from Middle Low German and still in use in the 21st century, we can note Ģederts, Indriķis, Jurģis, Tenis, Ints, Inta etc. In the context of placenames, one must take into account the historical diglossia that lasted until the 1st half of the 20th century. Between the German (initially Middle Low German) and Latvian names of cities, villages and manors there has been a diverse and manifold interaction. Meanwhile, in the names of farmhouses which were mostly coined in Latvian, one can observe many onymized borrowings from Middle Low German. The oldest Latvian surnames used in Riga during the 15–16th century can sometimes be (and are) interpreted as the first documentally attested instances of some Middle Low German borrowings in the Latvian language. Among the main conclusions of this article, one can point out the fact that most Middle Low German elements have entered Latvian proper names indirectly, through borrowed common nouns. Moreover, it is essential to continue the research (especially in the field of surnames) and to reevaluate the impact of Middle Low German borrowings in the Latvian language

The etymology of Modern English monkey

Modern English monkey does not represent a Romance loan-word of Arabian origin and transmitted by Middle Low German but is a vernacular diminutive derived from monk

What does solid spelling reveal about cognition? Evidence from Middle Low German

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of lexically complex graphemic units in Middle Low German – sequences that once occurred written as one word, but from today’s perspective are considered separate linguistic units. Examples are enwolde ‘did not want’ or isset ‘is it’. This phenomenon has received little attention, although it gives direct insight into the word concept of German and its diachronic change. The central question is what favors the perception of multiple words as a unit. Data from the Reference Corpus Middle Low German/Low Rhenish (1200–1650) show that it is mainly function words that occur in lexically complex graphemic units. Moreover, this study shows that besides from prosodic patterns, agreement and government relations reinforce lexical sequences to be perceived as linguistic units.Peer Reviewe

Combining ontologies and neural networks for analyzing historical language varieties: a case study in Middle Low German

In this paper, we describe experiments on the morphosyntactic annotation of historical language varieties for the example of Middle Low German (MLG), the official language of the German Hanse during the Middle Ages and a dominant language around the Baltic Sea by the time. To our best knowledge, this is the first experiment in automatically producing morphosyntactic annotations for Middle Low German, and accordingly, no part-of-speech (POS) tagset is currently agreed upon. In our experiment, we illustrate how ontology-based specifications of projected annotations can be employed to circumvent this issue: Instead of training and evaluating against a given tagset, we decomponse it into independent features which are predicted independently by a neural network. Using consistency constraints (axioms) from an ontology, then, the predicted feature probabilities are decoded into a sound ontological representation. Using these representations, we can finally bootstrap a POS tagset capturing only morphosyntactic features which could be reliably predicted. In this way, our approach is capable to optimize precision and recall of morphosyntactic annotations simultaneously with bootstrapping a tagset rather than performing iterative cycles

On the (non-)expletive uses of the preverbal negative ne/en in the history of (Low) German and Dutch

This article presents novel data from Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle Dutch showing that two phenomena which often have been treated as one, namely the single former negativemarker ne/en appearing in adverbial and complement clauses, have to be treated as distinct phenomena. I argue that only in complement clauses, ne/en is a paratactic negation marker, while in adverbial clausesit functions as an exceptive and adversative discourse marker. In these contexts, I refer to ne/en as post-cyclical Furthermore, I propose a scenario as to how the reanalysis from negation to exceptive markerproceeded

Parsing the Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG)

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