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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: Sean Crist
Email: kurisuto at panix dot com
Date: 2006-03-02 13:09:25
Subject: Re: acute versus circumflex
> Consulting your correction manual, I realized that you treat acute
> and cirmcumflex the same, namely as a marker for length, but
> Bosworth-Toller use acute in words like eów (to indicate hiat
> versus diphthong) and circumflex in words like frôfre (to
> indicate length). Those two diacritics are somewhat similar in the font
> used in Bosworth-Toller, but the acute rises more steeply and the
> circumflex has a tiny hook at the right end.
>
> Your example, however, 'under his clâðum'
> with a-circumflex is transcribed as 'under his cláðum'
> a-acute. I was not sure whether this is your policy (I haven't found
> any explicit rule about this on this site), or whether you haven't
> noticed it. In Old Norse it is usual to indicate length with acute, but
> in the Old English literature I know it is more usual to use circumflex
> or even macron
Sorry for the long delay in replying. I was out of town for most of February.
This question has come up before. The answer I've given is that Bosworth and Toller intended them to all be acutes, and that there's simply random variation as to how much the acute slants, probably because the typesetter didn't have enough of these somewhat unusual acute characters from a single run of pouring metal into the same mold.
Your post raises a new twist, namely the possibility that it's acute for hiatus and circumflex for length. If this is true, then at the very least, Bosworth and Toller aren't consistent about it, because I've found cases where there were multiple tokens of the same word within a single entry with this same substantial variation in the slant of the acute (or free interchange between acutes and circumflexes, to state it as you're identifying it). This is why I judged there not to be a meaningful distinction.
If you're right and I'm mistaken, however, then it's going to be a real major project to fix it at this point. I didn't train the OCR program to distinguish the two, and the hand corrections are more than halfway done. So I propose that we go on as we have rather than try to fix it in mid-stream (if a fix is needed). If we study this more carefully and it turns out that there's a real distinction, then probably, the least bad solution would be to do some kind of programmatic solution in the final clean-up after the hand corrections.
Actually, if the distinction is real, it could be somewhat fortuitous that it turned out this way. The graphical distinction between the two (if it's real) is so subtle that the OCR program would have never been able to distinguish them reliably and would have given essentially random results. It would have been an equally bad problem during hand corrections. So if it's a real distinction, then this might be one of those cases where a programmatic solution would probably give more accurate results than either OCR or human hand correction.
Comments welcome and wanted.
--Sean