29th June 2007

Email this Page |

A new electronic dictionary of medieval Irish was launched this week at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.

Researchers in the Institute for Irish and Celtic Studies at the University of Ulster have created a searchable electronic edition of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish language.  

The original dictionary, based largely on Gaelic material from the seventh to the seventeenth century, took over a hundred years to complete and contains over 35,000 entries.

Project Director, Professor Gregory Toner, said: “The early language is notoriously difficult to deal with. Not only is it a highly inflected language, but the spelling is highly irregular. Coupled with editorial inconsistency, it can be very difficult for researchers and students to locate a word in the original dictionary.” 

“This new resource will allow scholars of the Irish language to use the dictionary in a more creative way. For example, old manuscripts are often damaged and letters can be missing. The electronic dictionary can generate a list of possible matches for the damaged word based on the known letters.”

The website is intended to serve all scholars with an interest in medieval Ireland and in Celtic Studies, including linguists, textual scholars, historians, and archaeologists. Searches can be restricted to, for example, a particular language, to definitions, or to particular grammatical forms.  

“Irish and Latin were used side by side in Ireland for over a thousand years and it is important to understand how the two languages interacted and how concepts were expressed differently in them. The electronic dictionary can instantly find the equivalent terms in either language,” said Professor Toner.

Funding for the project came from the Arts and Humanities Research Council who have awarded a further £825,000 to the Institute to incorporate the latest research into the dictionary and bring it right up to date.  

The dictionary is available at www.dil.ie.

 

For further information, please contact:

Press Office, Department of Communication and Development
Tel: 028 9036 6178
Email: pressoffice@ulster.ac.uk