Maynooth wins grant to test new text dating methods
A leading professor at Ireland’s Maynooth University has been awarded €1.8m grant from the European Research Council for a project that will date a large number of 7th-10th Century Irish texts. The venture will also develop innovative methodologies for dating languages that will be applicable across the world, shedding new light on medieval literature, history and culture.
Professor David Stifter, head of Maynooth University’s department of early Irish, will lead a team of five researchers on the project entitled ‘Chronologicon Hibernicum – A Probabilistic Chronological Framework for Dating Early Irish Language Developments and Literature’ (ChronHib). The venture will develop and use new methods and sophisticated software to perform linguistic analysis on a large body of early medieval texts.
By looking for subtle changes in the language over the centuries, and by applying advanced statistical methods, Stifter will be able to profile language variations in texts of that period. The major result will be a ChronHib database, which will serve as the key reference point for the linguistic dating of Irish texts and will then provide a model for other old languages in Europe and beyond.
Commenting about the ERC project, Stifter said: “Linguistic dating is about to take a huge leap forward into the technological possibilities of the 21st Century. By developing and utilising unique methodologies that help us to accurately date these fascinating medieval texts and create linguistic profiles of their language, we are linking the past with the present. Given the complexity of Old Irish, the success of this project will represent a new model for the study of other languages that researchers all over the world will want to emulate.”
Stifter added that researchers around the world will be able to use the new dating methods in a way similar to how tree rings serve as chronological indicators in archaeology.
