Database Design and Sociolinguistics: Considerations for ByzTec (the Byzantine Tagged Electronic Corpus)

Abstract

In this paper work on building a linguistically tagged corpus of Byzantine texts (ByzTec) is discussed. In its present form the corpus consists of texts from the 10th and 14th centuries, and genres such as history, letter-writing and oratory are represented. Technical aspects of the corpus are described, as well as the different kinds of linguistic phenomena covered, such as morphology and semantics. So far, the primary purpose of the undertaking has been to facilitate the author’s own work on linguistic variation within an elite of Byzantine society. However, it is to be hoped that the corpus can be of use to others, including those interested in sociolinguistic aspects of Byzantine Greek.