The files in this repository are distributed under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/>).
Santorini, Beatrice. 2021. Penn Parsed Corpus of Historical Yiddish, v1.0. <https://github.com/beatrice57/penn-parsed-corpus-of-historical-yiddish>
Beatrice Santorini (beatrice DOT santorini AT gmail DOT com)
The work in the repository is dedicated to my teachers at Penn, with gratitude, respect, and affection, and especially:
- Henry Hoenigswald (1915-2003)
- Ellen Prince (1944-2010)
- Anthony Kroch (1946-2021)
The corpus contains roughly 200,000 words of historical (and modern) Yiddish. By far the largest contribution comes from two 20th-century texts, 1910e-grine-felder (15,611 words) and 1947e-royte-pomerantsn (67,558 words).
The origin of the corpus is as a collection of linguistically relevant examples that I collected in connection with research on the changing syntax of subordinate clauses in the history of Yiddish. Although most files have been updated to contain running text, some of them still reflect their origin, containing only subordinate clauses.
The corpus can be searched with CorpusSearch.
- Download: <https://sourceforge.net/projects/corpussearch/>
- Users guide: <https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/corpus-ling/CS-users-guide/index.html>
For convenience, the repository also contains two unpublished works based on the corpus:
- Santorini, Beatrice. 1995. The syntax of verbs in Yiddish. Unpublished manuscript, Northwestern University.
- Santorini, Beatrice. 1989. The generalization of the verb-second constraint in the history of Yiddish. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of those who helped me with the Old Yiddish data, including:
The staff of the Oriental Reading Room at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University
- Yasuko Hatcher
- Shu-ching Naughton
- Stella Newman
- Angela Stimpson
- Margaret Tippett
The staff of the Oriental Reading Room at the British Library in London:
- M Nolan
- G Rawlings
- P Stocks
- N Vail
The staff of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York:
- Dina Abramowitz
- Zachary Baker
The following faculty members at the University of Trier:
- Erika Timm
- Walter Roell
I am also very fortunate to have had the assistance of Talia Beck, who possesses a rare combination of proficiency in both Hebrew and Yiddish as well as knowledge of Jewish culture and who was therefore able to supply many glosses for the Hebrew material in the Yiddish texts.