Ronan Fitzgerald wrote:
> I am looking for a corpus of Irish language for some research, but all I
> seem to be able to find are corpora based on literary texts, predominantly
> dated from before the 20th Century. For my research purposes, I need a
> corpus that contains terminology that is as contemporary as possible.
Interesting, Ronan. I wonder if your research will bear out my experience
that contemporary Irish (say, Irish from the last quarter of the 20th
century), being written overwhelmingly by people belonging to a tradition
whose first language is English, is heavily based on English semantics, and
is substantially different (lexicographically, in particular) from what may
be called "continuity Irish", as transmitted - in three main dialects - by
native speakers of Irish.
I have about 3M words of literary continuity Irish from the first half of
the 20th century (see http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/tobar/index.htm for
some information) and as you say there are some other corpora of this sort.
But the differences between this and non-continuity Irish may well not be an
aspect with which you will be concerned.
On computing terminology in Irish, I offer some thoughts in the light of the
continuity/non-continuity divide in
http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/tearmai/index.htm.
I hope this is some help, and in any case, good luck with your work.
Ciarán Ó Duibhín.
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