A Dictionary of the Old Irish Priscian Glosses

The project aims to create a corpus dictionary of the Old Irish glosses dealing with the Latin grammar of Priscian, which are found in codex 904 of the Stiftsbibliothek of St Gall (Sankt Gallen, Switzerland) and in five minor mss. of roughly the same period. The project comprises the following tasks: (1) Creating a database where all entries are analyzed according to meaning and grammatical features. (2) Converting the database into a comprehensive dictionary which lists all instances of each single word (except for extremely frequent ones like the article or the copula, of which a representative sample must suffice); the entries will be arranged according to semantic and morphological categ-ories in order to allow the users to extract all relevant phonological, orthographical, morphological, syntactic and morpho-phonological information. (3) Publishing the dictionary as a printed version and as a searchable cd. (4) As a parallel undertaking, an online database containing all St Gall glosses (established by Dr Pdraic Moran, National University of Ireland, Galway) will be provided with extensive grammatical tagging. This database will be published on the internet without any restrictions to access.

The projects main task was the compilation of a corpus dictionary of all the Old Irish glosses dealing with the Latin grammar of Priscian, which are found in codex 904 of the Stiftsbibliothek of St Gall (Sankt Gallen, Switzerland) and in five minor mss. of roughly the same period. To accomplish this task, the project worker Mag. Bernhard Bauer entered all the Old Irish Priscian glosses into a Filemaker database, analysed them grammatically, commented on them and, naturally, also provided a full glossary for them. This database is an adapted version of the one developed by Dr Aaron Griffith for the Milan Glosses Dictionary Project (P 19137 Wörterbuch der air. Glossen in der Mailänder HS Ambr. C301, directed by Prof David Stifter, research fellow Dr Aaron Griffith). The main corpus of glosses adduced as a basis for this work, the St Gall glosses, was not taken from the gloss edition in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus but from a recently established online database containing the full text of the St Gall glosses (www.stgallpriscian.ie). This database was compiled by Padraic Moran and is itself based on the published as well as the unpublished work by Rijcklof Hofman on the Priscian glosses. Dr Moran has kindly granted full access to this database. The primary focus of the project was thus basic research, and the database will consequently provide a valuable basis for further linguistic research on the Old Irish glosses and the history of Old Irish itself. By providing comprehensive information on the Priscian glosses, it will be useful for historical and general linguistics, for Celtic and Irish linguistics, and for Celtic Studies in general. This database is also useful as a de facto dictionary of the Old Irish Priscian glosses. The database will be made accessible under the address http://www.univie.ac.at/indogermanistik/priscian/ in the course of May 2015.