Word length distributions in modern Welsh prose texts.

This paper examines the distribution of word lengths in 12 prose texts written in modern Welsh (a P-Celtic language). The texts belong to the genres of new articles and Bible translation. For all texts, the observed frequencies can best be fitted by the 1-displaced Singh-Poisson distribution. This differs from published results on a Q-Celtic language (Scottish Gaelic) and suggests a P-celtic/Q-Celtic difference in word-length distribution. Further work is required to investigate other genres of Welsh as well as the other P- and Q-celtic languages

Letter counting: a stem cell for Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics

Counting letters in written texts is a very ancient practice. It has accompanied the development of Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics. In Cryptology, counting frequencies of the different characters in an encrypted message is the basis of the so called frequency analysis method. In Quantitative Linguistics, the proportion of vowels to consonants in different languages was studied long before authorship attribution. In Statistics, the alternation vowel-consonants was the only example that Markov ever gave of his theory of chained events. A short history of letter counting is presented. The three domains, Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics, are then examined, focusing on the interactions with the other two fields through letter counting. As a conclusion, the eclectism of past centuries scholars, their background in humanities, and their familiarity with cryptograms, are identified as contributing factors to the mutual enrichment process which is described here

Language

The world's greatest playwright is as alive today as he was 400 years ago. His works reflect the political and domestic concerns of contemporary society and are read widely by students, adapted into lavish films, and staged in stunning new productions each year. His words have become commonplaces of the English language and continue to shape our view of the world. And while his works teach us much about ourselves, they also illuminate the world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean England in which he lived and wrote. The most exhaustive and authoritative work of its kind, this fully illustrated encyclopedia draws upon the expertise of a distinguished editor, internationally renowned advisory and editorial board, and hundreds of stellar contributors to chronicle Shakespeare's life, works, world, and legacy. Nearly 4,000 alphabetically arranged entries cover individual works, important actors, leading thinkers and theorists, influential modern adaptations, and numerous historical and contemporary social, political, cultural, and intellectual topics, such as Catholicism, costumes and clothing, jazz, lesbianism, madness, race, science, Shakespeare in the Arab world, and Shakespeare online. The entries, ranging from 50 to over 5,000 words, cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with appendices listing DVDs, fiction, and children's and young adult literature; an extensive bibliography of print and electronic resources for student research; and a comprehensive index

Brittonic

Peer reviewe

Punctuation effects in English and Esperanto texts

A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: {\it Alice in wonderland} and {\it Through a looking glass}. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a test for the role of punctuation in defining a style, and for contrasting natural and artificial, but written, languages. Several log-log plots of the sentence length-rank relationship are presented for the major punctuation marks. Different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents. The exponent can take a value much less than unity ($ca.$ 0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. The texts are also mapped into time series based on the word frequencies. The quantitative differences between the original and translated texts are very minutes, at the exponent level. It is argued that sentences seem to be more reliable than word distributions in discussing an author style.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures (3x2+1), 60 reference

Adjectival agreement in Middle and early Modern Welsh native and translated prose

This paper investigates adjectival agreement in a group of Middle Welsh native prose texts and a sample of translations from around the end of the Middle Welsh period and the beginning of the Early Modern period. It presents a new methodology, employing tagged historical corpora allowing for consistent linguistic comparison. The adjectival agreement case study tests a hypothesis regarding position and function of adjectives in Middle Welsh, as well as specific semantic groups of adjectives, such as colours or related modifiers. The systematic analysis with an annotated corpus reveals that there are interesting differences between the genres, as well as between individual texts. However, zooming in on our adjectival agreement case study, we conclude that these differences do not correspond to many of our hypotheses or assumptions about how certain texts group together. In particular, no clear split into native and translated texts emerged between the texts in our corpus. This paper thus shows interesting results for both (historical) linguists, especially those working on agreement, and scholars of medieval Celtic philology and translation texts.This paper investigates adjectival agreement in a group of Middle Welsh native prose texts and a sample of translations from around the end of the Middle Welsh period and the beginning of the Early Modern period. It presents a new methodology, employing tagged historical corpora allowing for consistent linguistic comparison. The adjectival agreement case study tests a hypothesis regarding position and function of adjectives in Middle Welsh, as well as specific semantic groups of adjectives, such as colours or related modifiers. The systematic analysis using an annotated corpus reveals that there are interesting differences between native and translated texts, as well as between individual texts. However, zooming in on our adjectival agreement case study, we conclude that these differences do not correspond to many of our hypotheses or assumptions about how certain texts group together. In particular, no clear split into native and translated texts emerged between the texts in our corpus. This paper thus shows interesting results for both (historical) linguists, especially those working on agreement, and scholars of medieval Celtic philology and translation texts.Peer reviewe

An Evaluation of the Celtic Hypothesis for Brythonic Celtic influence on Early English

The Celtic Hypothesis attributes some of the major linguistic changes in Old and Middle English to influence from the Brythonic languages that were spoken in Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon immigrations beginning in the fifth century. The hypothesis focuses on features of English that do not exist, or are not common, in the other Germanic languages but resemble features in the Celtic languages. From the evidence we have of the socio-political relationships between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons, the likely language contact situations are compatible with Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) ‘substratum interference’ and van Coetsem’s (1988) ‘imposition’, by which morpho-syntactic features are transferred from one language (L1) to another (L2) through imperfect second-language acquisition. The fact that the social situation was compatible with Brythonic influence on English does not mean, however, that the linguistic features in early English claimed by the proponents of the Celtic Hypothesis as showing Brythonic influence were actually influenced in this way. My purpose is to evaluate the Celtic Hypothesis in the light of the evidence and modern theories of language change due to contact. This thesis focuses on three features that have played a prominent role in the Celtic Hypothesis: (1) the dual paradigm of be (bēon and wesan) in Old English, (2) the periphrastic construction do + infinitive and (3) the periphrastic progressive construction be + -ing, the last two of which began to be grammaticalised in Middle English. I collect independent evidence from a selection of Middle Welsh texts of the parallel constructions: (1) the dual paradigm of bot ‘be’, (2) the periphrastic construction gwneuthur ‘do’ + verbal noun and (3) the periphrastic construction bot ‘be’ + particle + verbal noun. While the proponents of the Celtic Hypothesis provide examples of these constructions from several Brythonic languages including Middle Welsh, they give few examples and do not discuss the variability of the evidence according to date, region or genre. My own research confirms that the dual paradigms of be and bot do form a close parallel, but it also shows that the Old English dual paradigm is unlikely to have arisen due to Brythonic influence. My findings also show that evidence for the construction of gwneuthur ‘do’ + verbal noun is problematic: while it is very common in Middle Welsh prose narratives, it is very rare in the early prose annals and the earliest poems. Evidence for the progressive construction in early Welsh is similarly problematic: while it is regularly used in Colloquial Modern Welsh as bod ‘be’ + particle + verbal noun, it is by no means common in Middle Welsh. By looking at a wider range of Middle Welsh evidence, I demonstrate the limitations of the evidence relied on by proponents of the Celtic Hypothesis. This may lead to better substantiated arguments for the hypothesis in the future

When is a Knight a Knight? Attributive Adjectives and the Use of urdaỼl/urddol in the Middle Welsh Ystoryaeu Seint Greal

The Middle Welsh Ystoryaeu Seint Greal, the ‘Stories of the Holy Grail’, are a late fourteenth-century translation of two thirteenth-century Old French Arthurian texts—La Queste del Saint Graal and Le Haut Livre du Graal (Perlesvaus). Statistical analysis shows evidence of a sophisticated and so far unique system for the use of the adjective urdaỼl (Mod. Welsh urddol) ‘ordained’ in qualifying the status of otherwise unknown knights