{"id":380,"date":"2016-10-22T12:38:42","date_gmt":"2016-10-22T12:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/shakespearelang\/?p=380"},"modified":"2016-10-22T12:38:42","modified_gmt":"2016-10-22T12:38:42","slug":"smoothing-out-spelling-variation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/shakespearelang\/2016\/10\/22\/smoothing-out-spelling-variation\/","title":{"rendered":"Smoothing out spelling variation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Research Associate Jane Demmen highlights some of the issues involved in working with variable spellings that were typical of English in Shakespeare’s time…<\/em><\/p>\n

These days there are many sophisticated software tools that can find, count, sort and display words in a variety of useful ways to help linguists carry out research into texts which would be impossible using just the naked eye. We’re using some of these tools to produce the Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language<\/em>. However, a major obstacle for many linguistic software tools is recognising words that are spelled in more than one way, and counting them as one word form and not as separate word forms. English spelling was not fully standardised until well after the time that Shakespeare’s plays were written, and it was normal for words to be spelled in a variety of ways (sometimes depending on the way in which the writer would pronounce the words in speech).<\/p>\n

A human can get over this fairly easily and understand, for example, that would<\/em>, woud<\/em> and wud<\/em> are varying forms of the same word, but many computer software tools for linguistic research will read them as three different words. We want to group these varying word forms together to count them for the purposes of our Encyclopaedia entries, and indeed generally to be more accurate in our claims about Shakespeare’s language. Fortunately for us, we have the clever piece of software VARD 2 (Variant Detector; http:\/\/ucrel.lancs.ac.uk\/vard\/about\/) which was developed by Alistair Baron and colleagues in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University a few years ago to help ‘regularise’ spelling variation.<\/p>\n

VARD 2 has a built-in dictionary and a set of rules enabling it to recognise a great many variations of common spellings and then suggest an appropriate replacement to a standard form (the standard usually being a modern form, e.g. would<\/em> in the example above). It has an automatic mode, in which it will find and replace spelling variants on its own when run through a text, including:<\/p>\n