English Title: A database of 14th century middle Dutch dialects on computer

English Abstract

This study describes the organization of a database, created at the Free University Amsterdam, consisting of about 2,500 charters in Middle Dutch, about 750,000 tokens. The charters were written in the Netherlands and Flanders between 1300 and 1400. Only original texts were chosen, which are dated and located. Most of them have not been published before and are to be found in the archives of The Hague, Leiden, Zwolle, Antwerp, Brussels, etc. It is shown how a charter is treated on its way from the archives to its computer format, how the data are structured and how new information - morphological coding - is added. Special attention has been paid to the way how information has been stored which is not easy to be handled on computer directly. The enriched text may be used for different purposes, not only lexicographical but even dialectal. The second part of the study serves to illustrate how the data can be exploited in view of dialect research. As an example, the verb "zullen" has been chosen. It is shown that the vowels of this verb are not the same in the different Dutch speaking areas. The results are represented on dialect maps.

Keywords: charters, computer formats, computerization, dutch, electronic language data base, etymology, grammatical analysis, lexicography, manuscripts, middle dutch dialects, pronunciation, semi-automatic coding of text