Old Language(s), New Technologies: Corpus Linguistics and European Languages in the Renaissance, 1400s-1600s
The Renaissance is universally acknowledged to be a crucial moment in Europe for the development of vernacular national languages which begin to establish their prestige alongside Latin. Historical linguists have focused on the many interesting peculiarities of the European vernaculars in this period, such as the high degree of spelling fluctuation, (non-)lexicalisation of words, phonological and morphological adjustments, semantic shifts, etc. When it comes to diachronic approaches to corpus linguistics, however, scholars are sometimes sceptic about the possibilities offered by machine-readable samples of both literary and non-literary texts belonging to the Renaissance.