Grapho-Phonology | Benjamin Molineaux (Edinburgh)

From Inglis to Scots (FITS)

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mapping Older Scots sounds to spellings, the stems from an AHRC project at the University of Edinburgh’s Angus McIntosh Centre.

Currently under construction, this corpus will survey the variation in spelling within the earliest recorded period of Scots (based on the data in ). The objective is to elucidate the language’s underlying sound system, via the orthographic alternations within the Germanic morphemes of the corpus, as well as suggesting how their sound and spelling features developed from proposed sources. As in the case of CoNE, the corpus of forms (here the spelling and sound values of Germanic root-morphemes in LAOS) is accompanied by a corpus of changes tracing the attested forms back to a proposed source. The FITS team are Bettelou Los (PI), Rhona Alcorn (Co-investigator), Warren Maguire (Co-investigator), Alpo Honkapohja (RA), Joanna Kopaczyk (RA), Pia Lehecka (RA), Benjamin Molineaux (RA), and Vasilis Karaiskos (Programmer).

Corpus of Historical Mapudungun

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The is a digital, linguistically-tagged collection of many of the earliest writings in the Mapudungun language, spanning materials from 1606 to 1930. Also known as Mapuche, Mapudungun (ARN) is the ancestral tongue of the Mapuche people and is spoken today (to varying degrees) by an estimated 250,000 people in Chile and Argentina. To date, no clear family affiliation has been proposed for Mapudungun, so it is often treated as a language isolate.

The first stage of the CHM (Version 1.0) is the outcome of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship awarded to Benjamin Molineaux at the University of Edinburgh’s Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, which ran from April 2018 to March 2021. The search capabilities of the corpus have all been developed by Vasilis Karaiskos.

Sound and spelling variation in Older Scots

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 11:00:00 +0000

I am a team-member in the AHRC-funded project, mapping sounds to spellings in the earliest documentary records for the Scots Language. Our source materials are the etymologically Germanic root morphemes in the tagged texts of the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots ( ).

Our objective is to try to track individual morphemes and segments’ development through time and space, in order to (re)build the phonological history of the earliest period of the language “from the bottom up”. To this effect, spelling – and variation therein – is crucial. We will be mapping written forms to presumed sounds, and placing their variation across time and space in order to retrieve representative patterns.

A sample mapping of sounds to spellings (and vice-versa), from the FITS database: