19th Annual Student Research Conference
Language & Literature
A Middle English Geoffrey of Franconia: A Dialectal Analysis
Andrea L. Waldrop
Dr. Christine Harker, Faculty Mentor
The presentation will explain the procedures used to decipher Middle English paleography, orthographically transcribe "Geoffrey of Franconia's Book of Trees and Wines" into a printed document, and analyze the text's written dialect to pinpoint the provenance of the scribe who copied this medieval English version of the text. Since medievalists have limited surviving resources available for language studies, transcription increases the accessibility of original texts for scholarly consultation. Prescribed by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, the 'fit' technique is used to answer questions about the manuscript's age and origin by extracting linguistic data from the transcript. This endeavor combines linguistics, statistics, and geography, making it a truly interdisciplinary endeavor.
Keywords: transcription, dialectal analysis, medieval text, Middle English, manuscript
Topic(s):Interdisciplinary
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: 5-1
Location: VH 1320
Time: 8:15