Middle English Grammar Project

A project is underway at the University of Stavanger in Norway to analyse the grammar of Middle English, according to this article. Philologists at the university have already digitised 1,000 Middle English texts from the 1300s-1500s from all over Britain, and made them available on their website. The corpus includes texts on legal, religious, medical and astrological matters, as well as cookery books and literary texts. Most are being digitised for the first time.

The texts can be used to study dialects, as at the time they were written, people wrote more or less as they spoke and there was no standardised spelling system. They can also be used as a way to learn more about the grammatical development of English.

One thought on “Middle English Grammar Project

  1. it’s a shame the corpus isn’t properly Unicode compliant, but I’m sure they have their reasons for that, still a shame…

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