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PoS-tagged Middle Welsh texts from Oxford, Jesus College MS. 119
Elena Parina, Raphael Sackmann and Marieke Meelen
The data result from the project ’Translations as language contact phenomena: studies in lexical, grammatical
and stylistic interference in Middle Welsh religious texts’ (led by Prof Erich Poppe, Philipps-Universität
Marburg) 1 October 2015-30 September 2018, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. The main publication
from the project, currently under preparation, will be Parina & Poppe (fthc.).
The source data, transcriptions of the texts from Oxford, Jesus college MS. 119, also known as the Book of
the Anchorite of Llanddewi Brefi or Llyfr yr Ancr, were obtained from the Cardiff project Rhyddiaith
Gymraeg/ Welsh Prose 1300-1425 (with kind permission from Prof Sioned Davies and Dr Diana Luft).
The automatic part-of-speech tagging was completed by Dr Marieke Meelen (University of Cambridge).
Manual corrections were done by Dr Elena Parina and Raphael Sackmann M.A.
These PoS-tagged and also syntactically annotated (chunk-parsed) files are also stored as part of the Parsed
Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language (PARSHCWL http://lion.ling.cam.ac.uk/parshcwl/index.html),
however we thought it useful to create and store separately the PoS-tagged files, since they have the simplest
txt-format and offer data for different sorts of linguistic analysis, esp. using regular expressions.
The names of the files correspond to the following titles of the texts given in the Rhyddiaith Gymraeg project
and to the pages in the manuscript:
File name
title in Luft 2013
LlA-3v
none
LlA-4v
none
Lucidar
Ystoria Lucidar
5r-69v
Marwolaeth
Marwolaeth Mair
69v-77r
Ymborth
Ymborth yr Enaid
78r-92v
Dewi
Buchedd Dewi
93r-103v
Beuno
Buchedd Beuno
104r-110r
Adrian
Ystoria Adrian ac Ipotis
111r-119r
Credo
Credo Athanasius
119r-121r
Paddelw
Pa ddelw y dylai dyn
121r-125r
gredu y Dduw
Pader
Pwyll y Pader o ddull Hu Sant
125r-128r
Rhinweddau
Rhinweddau Gwrando Offeren
128v-129r
+ Rhinweddau Gweled Corff Crist
Pawl
Breuddwyd Pawl
129r-132v
Epistol
Epistol y Sul
132v-134r
Luc1
Rhybudd Gabriel
134r-134v
Ieuan1
Efengyl Ieuan
134v-136r
Trindod
Y Drindod yn un Duw
136r-137r
Gwlad
Gwlad Ieuan Fendigaid
137v-143v
LlA-3v and LlA-4v are transcriptions of the first two pages of the manuscript written by its scribe; these
feature the contents of the manuscript (3v) and the famous colophon with the reference to the manuscript’s
date, patron, and scribe as well as the prologue to Lucidar (4v).
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The work stages were the following:
1. Preprocessing (March 2016) – Raphael Sackmann & Elena Parina
Special characters were normalized, such as <6> to <w>, in order to enhance searchability.
Tokens were divided and combined to facilitate further tagging.
Some emendations were made following editions of the texts or parallel readings from other manuscripts, they
are marked with #.
Sentence boundaries were introduced (with <utt> markers), according to our understanding of Middle Welsh
syntax. As subsequent work showed, this operation depends in a high degree on theoretical background and
personal decisions and affects measurements of such features as word order.
2. POS Tagging (September 2016- March 2017)
Tagger: Marieke Meelen (see Meelen 2016)
Manual corrections: Raphael Sackmann & Elena Parina with advice from Erich Poppe
The tags are explained in Meelen (2016: 328-330) and are an expanded version of the tagset used in UPenn
Historical corpora (https://www.ling.upenn.edu/histcorpora/).
The parser was first trained on the Middle Welsh Mabinogion corpus compiled by Meelen (2016) and then
applied to three Llyfr yr Ancr texts. These texts were then manually corrected and included into the training
corpus, which led to an improved performance of the tagger on the next set of the texts. The annotators aimed
at consistency throughout the texts, but some effects of this multi-staged procedures might be reflected in the
tagging. The texts were tagged and corrected in the following order:
1. Marwolaeth
2. Rhinweddau
3. Epistol
4. Pa ddelw
5. Pader
6. Pawl
7. Luc1
8. Trindod
9. Gwlad
10. Ieuan1
11. Credo
12. Lucidar
13. Adrian
14. Ymborth
15. Beuno
16. Dewi
An annotation log was kept to document all the decisions and changes and is available from
Elena Parina at request.
Bibliography
Luft, Diana, Peter Wynn Thomas, and D. Mark Smith. 2013. Rhyddiaith Gymraeg 1300-1425.
http://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk.
Meelen, Marieke. 2016. Why Jesus and Job spoke bad Welsh: The origin and distribution of V2
orders in Middle Welsh. Utrecht: LOT.
Parina, Elena, and Erich Poppe. fthc. Translating devotion in medieval Wales: Studies in the
texts and language of Llyfr Ancr Llanddewibrefi. (with contributions by Meelen, Marieke,
Sackmann, Raphael, and Scherschel, Ricarda)
