Bilingual Dictionaries in an English Renaissance Knowledge Base

Abstract

The Renaissance Knowledge Base is a computer-searchable kernel library of electronic texts, a text database for literary and historical studies, for the period 1485-1640. It consists of literature by major authors as well as prose 'reference' books including scripture, sermons, chronicles, encyclopedias, legal works and dictionaries. The five principal bilingual dictionaries will be John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530), Sir Thomas Elyot's first Latin-English dictionary (1538), Thomas Thomas' Dictionarium linguae latinae et anglicanae (1587), Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English tongues (1611) and John Florio's Italian-English A worlde of wordes (1611). The tagging system employed derives from the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines of 1990 (ed. Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard), which are based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), an ISO standard. In this paper I describe some differences between COCOA-style encoding and TEI/SGML-style encoding, specifically as these relate to the tagging of Palsgrave's and Cotgrave's texts, and to the kind of text-retrieval inquiries that the tagging system will facilitate.