Medieval multilingualism in Poland: Creating a corpus of Greater Poland court oaths (ROThA)
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Date
2016
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
In this paper we introduce the research plan for the preparation of a searchable electronic
repository of the earliest extant legal oaths from medieval Poland drawing on the expertise in
historical corpus-building developed for the history of English. The oaths survive in the
overwhelmingly Latin land books from the period between 1386 and 1446 for six localities
Greater Poland, in which the land courts operated: Poznań, Kościan, Pyzdry, Gniezno, Konin and
Kalisz. A diplomatic edition of the oaths was published in five volumes by Polish historical
linguists (Kowalewicz & Kuraszkiewicz 1959–1966). The edition is the only comprehensive
resource of considerable scope (over 6300 oaths from the years 1386–1446) for the study of the
earliest attestations of the Polish language beyond glosses. Recognising some limitations, but
most of all its unparalleled coverage of the coexistence of Latin and the vernacular, the ROThA
project embarks on transforming the edition into an open up-to-date digital resource. We thus aim
to facilitate research into the history of Polish and Latin as well as of the legal system and the
related social and linguistic issues of the period.
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The authors gratefully acknowledge the Polish National Science Centre grant (NCN 2014/13/B/HS2/00644) which facilitated research presented in the paper.
Keywords
multingualism, Polish-Latin code-switching, mediaeval court oaths, Greater Poland, Old Polish, historical written code-switching
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 51.3(2016), pp. 9-35