The main activity in the project involved building a comprehensive digital Lemma Bank for Old Irish using RDF technology, which allows different graph databases to talk to each other effectively. This Lemma Bank currently consists of approximately 6000 entries, mostly encompassing verbs and nouns. The project has demonstrated how digital tools can be adapted to work with historical languages that have limited resources and documentation. For modelling purposes, the LiLa ontology was used, a standardised framework originally designed for Latin (lila-erc.eu) and adapted it to work with Old Irish linguistic data. One of the key decisions was how to handle the messy reality of historical language data, and in particular, the variation found in dictionaries to lemmatise the same word. Old Irish texts show considerable variation in spelling, word forms, and grammatical analysis depending on the manuscript source and scholarly tradition. Rather than forcing artificial consistency through a single harmonised annotation system, the project opted to preserve the distributed nature of the data using properties to model morphological alternatives and spelling variants, inspired by the way LiLa has modelled lemmas. In other words, the project used specific technical properties to link alternative word forms and spelling variants, maintaining the integrity of different scholarly approaches while enabling digital processing and interlinking. While automatic extraction of lemmas in dictionaries/lexical resources was possible to some extent, building the Lemma Bank entailed careful aligning of dictionary/lexical resource entries and a significant amount of manual work and validation, with the purpose of attaining a high standard in this important novel resource. As for verb lemmas, the PF was assisted by an intern, whom he guided throughout the process of collecting and aligning.
The main achievements can be summarised as follows:
- The MOLOR project has applied the Linked Data paradigm to Old Irish, using semantic web standards and controlled vocabularies, which is a first
- For the purpose of collecting lemmas, the project has investigated and critically reflected on the lexicographical landscape for Old Irish, the weaknesses and strengths of the available resources, and lemmatisation choices
- The project has produced a MOLOR Old Irish Lemma Bank, crucial technology for future linguistic resource interlinking purposes
The following are important outcomes:
- The MOLOR Old Irish Lemma Bank and the process of its creation may act as an inspiration for scholarly communities working on other historical and ancient languages
- In the spirit of Linked Data, everyone can link to this new resource in a completely open and free manner
- The project has contributed to uncovering European linguistic heritage, including linguistic heritage and multilingualism, important pillars in Horizon Europe
