Background and history

The starting point of the Nerthus project was the state of the scholarly investigation of the fields of Old English lexicology and lexicography. On the side of lexicology, an exhaustive study of the Old English lexicon in general and word-formation in particular is still pending. On the lexicographical side, the standard dictionaries of Old English reflect the nineteenth-century tradition of Anglo-Saxon studies, which, to the twenty-first-century linguist, implies a wealth of information but also inconsistences and incompatibility with modern linguistic theory. The Dictionary of Old English incorporates up-to-date lexicographical and lexicological practice, but it has reached only the letter G so far, so that it cannot be the basis for an analysis of the whole lexicon that wishes to attain consistency and congruence.

In the wider context of information society, the latest developments of the Web have taken steps towards an Internet with more managable and accessible information in which databases play a remarkable role. In the area of Old English, although there is a great amount of available information, the variety of sources and the diversity of presentations call for a synthesis that systematises the data and structures the relations which hold among them. From the theoretical point of view, such a synthesis, given that the lexicon is central to linguistic architecture, should have a lexical layout, with entries that combine morphological, syntactic and semantic information. On the applied side, the database software allows the compilers to combine previous findings and new results into an explicit and principled presentation of large sets of data. The database can also be adapted to new findings or research aims. Moreover, a relational database maximises the links between related data and enhaces the retrievability of significant information.

Against this background, the Nerthus project carries out linguistic analysis of Old English by means of database software. Three versions of the lexical database Nerthus have already been published online, the latest one in 2016. NerthusV3 is the result of a substantial revision of the data stored in previous versions and, above all, changes the format completely with respect to Nerthus and NerthusV2: instead of a search engine that searches the data by headword, as in a dictionary, NerthusV3 allows the user to search the data by field or by combination of fields (predicate, alternative spelling, category, translation, inflectional morphology, inflectional forms). Last but not least, NerthusV3 is an open access publication.