Concordance de l'occitan médiéval / A Concordance of Medieval Occitan (COM-2). Les Troubadours; Les Textes narratifs en vers . CD with booklet. Guide de l'utilisateur/Users' Guide , and: Bibliographie/Bibliography (review)

Abstract

REVIEW Ricketts, Peter T., ed., in collaboration with Alan Reed, F.R.P. Akehurst, John Hathaway and Cornells van der Horst. Concordance de l'occitan médiéval I A Concordance of Medieval Occitan (COM-2). Les Troubadours; Les Textes narratifs en vers. CD with booklet. Guide de l 'utilisateur/Users ' Guide, pp. 1-45; Bibliographie/Bibliography, pp. 48-135. Turnhout: Brepols,2005. ISBN 2-503-5 141 6-2. The COM team has a success on its hands. The project, Concordance de l'occitan médiéval (COM), born in the early 1960s, made a most auspicious public debut in 2001, putting the entire troubadour lyric corpus at the fingertips ofusers. The second tranche ofCOM came out in mid-2005, adding non-lyric narrative verse texts to the troubadours. The third tranche will give texts in prose. A target date of2010 has been set for the final tranche, if funding becomes available, to consist ofa database containing all troubadour songbooks {chansonniers) in edited interpretative versions ofthe poems, with concordance available. It appears, at most recent news, that interpretative versions ofthe chansonniers will be available in COM as well as on the RIALTO website, with RIALTO offering as well versions in semi-diplomatic format, respecting word breaks and other elements as found in each manuscript. COM aims to provide the totality ofOld Occitan texts, literary and non-literary, from earliest attestations to the end ofthe 15tn century, its concordance due to run to an estimated 7 million words. Just as COM-2 updates and integrates COM-I, all four tranches will eventually fit on a single CD, including space for software. The text database of COM-2 offers full texts of all troubadours and verse narratives, some ofthese in editions so new they are not yet in print - all ofthis availability, ofcourse, paying tribute not only to Peter Ricketts' staminaand expertise, but also to his acumen in the world of commercial publishing. The COM bibliography incorporates a dozen references and links to the RIALTO site at the University ofNaples, a number sure to grow 63 REVIEW as both projects move forward. The COM concordance feature goes far beyond the KWIC (key word in context) format that first became available several decades ago (for Occitan studies in the US, Ron Akehurst was the pioneer in this domain). COM users certainly can find verses in context (from single verses up to chunks of7 lines), with search terms appearing in bold within their verses on the Result screen. However, the real forte of the COM search engine lies in its collocations feature, which can be set to search two words at distances from 0 to 9 words. Once COM is installed and running, the user sees three main tabs at the top of the screen: Bibliography leftmost, with separate subsections for "The Troubadours" and "Narrative Verse." Centered, the Search screen offers a choice between "Whole Vocabulary," "Rhyme Vocabulary," and "Collocations." In the Search screen, in addition to scrolling through the entire concordance, three "Find" windows enable searching for specific items: word, prefix and suffix. The right-hand column ofthe Search page responds instantly to whatever is typed into the "Find - Word" window. The right-hand tab opens the Results screen displays search items in context; it remains blank unless "Next" has been pressed on Search screen. A five-minute video is available to demonstrate (most of) the features of the software and the CD contents. With all its remarkable versatility and satisfying speed, COM is perhaps not as easy to use as some ofthe attendant literature (including the booklet packaged with the CD-ROM) might suggest. A few words about what COM is not. The COM concordance database is not a dictionary. It offers no glosses. It is not lemmatized, although it is said to offer "lexemes in context". While each form in the concordance is indeed a minimal unit of the concordance, those units are not abstract. Instead, one might more accurately term them "word-forms," or as Peter Ricketts has also phrased it, "orthographic variants" (). As one example in the User's booklet, COM offers some seven word-forms or variants for 'today': ancoi, ancuei, ancuey, encoy, encuei, encuey, eytueri. This...