Computer-assisted study of early German: The Mannheim symposium of 1973

Abstract

THE GROWING NUMBER of conferences on computer-assisted research in the humanities seems to fall into two broad categories. The first kind attempts to address all aspects of the humanities, touching briefly on literature, art, music etc. While this general type of conference goes back many years and is still often held today, another more specialized approach has been gaining in popularity. A case in point is the symposium held June 15 and 16, 1973, at the Institut far Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and conducted by Hugo Moser and Winfriec ! Lenders of Bonn, the meeting limited its consideration to the computer-assisted study of early German. 1 The problem areas considered during the symposium were Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Analysis (Roy A. Boggs, Pittsburgh: "Recognition and analysis of syntactic units in Hartmann yon Aue"; Ute Krumnack, Bonn: "Synthesis and analysis of inflected nominal forms"; Theo Bungarten, Bonn: "Syntactic and semantic analysis of Wittenweiler's Ring"; Erich Strassner, TSbingen, and Jiirgen SchSnhut, Erlangen: "A method of syntactic analysis for early German texts"; Jochen Splett, Miinster: "Methods of grammatical analysis of the Old High German glosses"); Problems of Processing Manuscripts (Heinz Thoelen, Cologne: "Progress report on the dictionary to Ulrich Fuetrer's Buch der Abenteuer"); Ulrich Mtiller, Stuttgart/Salzburg: "Observations on the analysis of the Minnesang manuscripts"): Stylistics and Metrics (Bernhard Plate, Regensburg: "Textual comparisons of the verse and prose versions of Eilhart von Oberge's Tristant und Isalde'~ Rudolf Hirschmann, Los Angeles: "Analysis of meter and rhythm"): and Reports on American Projects (Martin Wierschin, San Diego: "Preparation of a new edition of the Eckenlied"; Klaus M. Schmidt, Bowling Green: "Analysis of conceptual systems in Middle High German texts"; R. Hirschmann and Roy A. Wisbey, London: "Reports on other American Projects"). A major concern underlying many of the papers and much of the discussion at the symposium was the method and extent of lemmatizing conventional computer-generated concordances. Although an unlemmatized concordance can already be of great help in textual analysis, and although this is an appropriate form of publication for the less important works, it was generally felt that the major works deserve the additional investment of effort required for the preparation of a lemmatized concordance. Indeed, for the longer such works those for which the publication of a full concordance would be economically impossible it seems clear that the logical alternative, the word " ,ex, would have to be lemmatized. This view, widely accepted among scholars in early German, seems attested to by the numerous projects dealing with syntactic, morphological and semantic questions and intended to produce lemmatized concordances and indexes. Roy Boggs, addressing this problem in relation to his forthcoming concordance to the works of Hartmann yon Aue, 2 touched on practical problems of data management and outlined his ultimate goal of constructing a tagmemic syntax for Hartmann. The efforts of the Bonn research group, represented by the papers of Ute Krumnack and Theo Bungarten, have resulted in perhaps the most advanced procedures for the syntactic analysis of Middle High German. Krumnack described a procedure for the automated analysis and generation of noun forms developed during the preparation of an index to Wittenweiler's Ring. a Some manual interaction with