In the first 30 months of the project, the Chronologicon Hibernicum team have been working on laying the linguistic-phonological groundwork on the basis of which the more advanced goals (e.g. statistical approaches) of the coming years can build. The team has been creating and adapting lexicographic databases of key Old Irish texts, such as the Annals of Ulster, the so-called 'Minor Glosses' of Old Irish, and related texts. It has been one of the central issues of the work so far to agree on a standard of analysing and annotating Old Irish texts in a way which reflects the subtleties of synchronic variation and diachronic change of the language, and which makes best use of the possibilities of current computational technology.
The second part of the project was dominated by the creation of the lexicographic database Corpus PalaeoHibernicum (CorPH; URL:
https://chronhib.maynoothuniversity.ie/chronhibWebsite/tables(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). It includes 78 texts (of very diverse length) from the Old and Middle Irish periods, totalling appr. 135,000 tokens, of which c. 110,000 are Old Irish. Many of the included texts have been checked against the manuscripts in the process of data entry and it has been possible to correct many textual errors that had been perpetuated in the past. All tokens (termed 'morphs' for Irish-language elements) in the database have been deeply annotated for information such as POS, morphological analysis, but also for Variation. The development of a system of Variation Tagging is one of the methodological advances brought about by the project. The other major innovation was the development of a statistical method, based on Bayesian statistics, for modelling linguistic change over time (Bayesian Language Variation Analysis).
Four workshops and conferences were organised in Maynooth (2016-9) on topics such as computational and corpus-based linguistics and variation and change in syntax and morphology. Key contributions to these workshops were published in the edited volume "Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages. Corpus-based Approaches". Eds. Elliott Lash, Fangzhe Qiu, David Stifter [= TiLSM 346], Berlin: de Gruyter 2020. doi 10.1515/9783110680744.
As a by-product of the project work, many new insights about the diachronic and synchronic linguistical variation of Old Irish (phonology, morphology, syntax) have been made, which will also have an effect on our understanding of Old Irish grammar in general. Through the use of social media, the project members have not only propagated the results of the project research, but have also raised awareness of Early Irish and its importance for the intellectual history of Ireland and Europe as a whole. The project has been in exchange with other researchers and projects in Early Irish studies, and has fostered these collaborations in workshops.
