Medieval Multilingualism in Poland: Creating a Corpus of Greater Poland Court Oaths (Rotha)

Abstract

†In this paper we introduce the research plan for the preparation of a searchable electronic repository of the earliest extant legal oaths from medieval Poland drawing on the expertise in historical corpus-building developed for the history of English. The oaths survive in the overwhelmingly Latin land books from the period between 1386 and 1446 for six localities Greater Poland, in which the land courts operated: Poznań, Kościan, Pyzdry, Gniezno, Konin and Kalisz. A diplomatic edition of the oaths was published in five volumes by Polish historical linguists (Kowalewicz & Kuraszkiewicz 1959-1966. The edition is the only comprehensive resource of considerable scope (over 6300 oaths from the years 1386-1446) for the study of the earliest attestations of the Polish language beyond glosses. Recognising some limitations, but most of all its unparalleled coverage of the coexistence of Latin and the vernacular, the ROThA project embarks on transforming the edition into an open up-to-date digital resource. We thus aim to facilitate research into the history of Polish and Latin as well as of the legal system and the related social and linguistic issues of the period.

Multilingualism in Greater Poland court records (1386–1448): tagging discourse boundaries and code-switching

“…To achieve these aims, annotation of multilingual features needs to be implemented in a computer-readable and searchable version of the printed edition. However, as we have shown in our studies (Kopaczyk et al;2016;Włodarczyk et al forthcoming a;Włodarczyk and Adamczyk, forthcoming b), the complexity of CS between Latin and Polish is so rich that no annotation scheme will be able to capture all its features. Instead, the compilers aim to include the tagging of CS phenomena on the highest level of linguistic and discourse organisation, as well as on the level of syntax and lexicon, albeit excluding personal and place names where CS is frequently present on the level of morphology (Kucała, 1974).…”