Orð og tunga - 01.06.2001, Page 63

Jóhannes Bjami Sigtryggsson & Christopher Sanders
The Copenhagen Old Norse Word-list1
1 Introduction
A list of headwords that will be treated in the dictionary of Old Icelandic and Old
Norwegian prose — currently being published by the Amamagnæan Commission
in Copenhagen — has now been produced.2 The article describes the background,
production, and expected benefits to be derived from this list (subsequently referred to
as “the word-list”).
2 Background
The Amamagnæan Commission’s Ordbog over det norr0ne prosasprog //A Dicúonary
of Old Norse Prose (subsequently ONP) has, as many readers of this joumal will be
aware, an extensive past history.3 It was conceived before the use of computers in
linguistics and lexicography was a commonplace, but has, since the middle of the
1980s, made extensive use of computer technology. One of the features that its early
planners had not taken into consideration was the need for a comprehensive list of the
headwords that the dictionary should contain in its published form. A list of this type,
given that it should also specify word class and the number of citation slips (the number
of tokens) that represent each headword, had gradually become essential to the planning
of the production of a twelve-volume work. Words of different classes have varying
'The authors are, respectively, the editor of the word-list and, as one of the six current editors of the
dictionary, the project supervisor.
2The underlying corpus of the dictionary is the prose works of Icelandic up to ca. 1540 and Norwegian
proseupto ca. 1370.
3Since the appearance of the Pr0vehœfte // Prospectus in 1983, the following two volumes have been
published: Registre // lndices (1989) and ONP 1: a-bam (1995) (for the explanatory booklet that accompanies
ONP I: a-bam, see footnote 5 below); for recent general descriptions of ONP see Rode (1991:67-71) and
Sanders (1997:81-88).
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