Nua-Chorpas na hÉireann | The New Corpus for Ireland

What is the New Corpus for Ireland?

The new English-Irish dictionary will be based on the biggest and best linguistic resources available. The corpus includes:

A new corpus of Irish, containing 30 million words. This corpus is based on the National Corpus of Irish developed by the ITÉ (Linguistics Institute of Ireland) and containing 8.5 million words, together with a further 15.5 million words also collected by the ITÉ. A further 6 million words was added to this database during Phase 1.
A new corpus of Irish-English, with 25 million words of text written – in newspapers, novels, and other sources – by authors from the island of Ireland.
Additionally, we have drawn on existing resources for British and American English, including the British National Corpus (BNC) and data licensed from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in Pennsylvania.

This huge database of language is harnessed to Adam Kilgarriff’s state-of-the-art software, providing the project with linguistic tools that are more advanced than any currently available to any dictionary project in the world. Furthermore, Foras na Gaeilge is working in partnership with the Centre for Language and Communication Studies (CLCS) in Trinity College to further enhance the software which handles part of speech tagging in the Irish corpus.

For further information on the corpus design principles upon which compilation of The New Corpus for Ireland is based, click here.

Why do we need a corpus of Irish English? Surely we speak the same language as they do in England …

Here's why:
All the ways of saying things that we've collected here wouldn't be said in England, and they all come from Nuala O'Faolain's lovely book Are you somebody? (Dublin, New Island Books 1996). Thanks to Nuala for letting us show them here.

to go asleep (‘to go to sleep’ in British English): lch 67 He drank his milk from a Gordon’s gin bottle with a teat and soon went asleep.
out the back of: lch. 247 So they went out to Kinsealy and hid out the back of Mr Haughey’s house for three days. blow-in
blow-in: lch 227 “A wee mortar bomb in Poleglass woke me up this morning,” the wife says. “You can hear explosions across the Lough. I do wonder, sometimes, why we’re so fortunate, when they’re so unfortunate. But then, I’m a blow-in.” She sends her children – Catholics – to the Church of Ireland school.
bring ('take' in British English): lch 379 Not long after that, she agreed to go into a psychiatric hospital for her drinking. He and his car weren’t around. I brought her, in a taxi.
down the country (‘away out in the country’ in British English): lch 249 He left that court almost entirely alienated from the Fianna Fáil establishment and the Fianna Fáil business connections. He turned to that other Ireland, which is neither northside nor southside. He went down the country, and there he served his time.
lch 73 One of my younger sisters lives in a town down the country.
lch 253 The worst example I ever saw was down the country. The house was full of pale brothers and sisters who sometimes burst into silent vicious fighting.
craythur: lch 365 Caitlin wrote a play for Christmas about a poor craythur from the country looking for Woolworth’s cafeteria – the first one in the city. I’m talking about the 1930s.
culchie: lch 365 Caitlin wrote a play for Christmas about a poor craythur from the country looking for Woolworth’s cafeteria – the first one in the city. I’m talking about the 1930s. I remember how we fell around laughing and of course she was the culchie and did it to perfection, make-up and all. We would have been about twelve, that was it.
daftie: lch 40 In Monaghan, the girl with the crush was called a “daftie”: a popular senior girl might have eight or ten dafties. The dafties competed to get the loved one to accept presents.
debs' ball (meaning a school dance): lch 241 The head nun cancelled revision classes, cancelled the debs’ ball, and, in general, demonstrated to the girls where, as a matter of fact, power lies.
to fall around: lch 365 I remember how we fell around laughing and of course she was the culchie and did it to perfection, make-up and all.
to give out: lch 247 So they went out to Kinsealy and hid out the back of Mr Haughey’s house for three days. Someone gave them out food. (‘gave out food to them’ in British English)
to give out about something: lch 336 Every few years, someone gives out about RTÉ transmitting the Angelus bell. This attracts some comment, and then the subject is dropped, till the next time.
to kick up ('to kick up a fuss' in British English): lch 191 Why do they want children to stay quiet and go away? Single middle-aged women aren’t supposed to kick up, either.
on the labour ('on the dole' in British English): lch 253 This woman was telling me the other day that where she lives nearly everybody is on the labour.
land ('a let-down' in British English): lch 229 And to see them out in their Hermes scarves, and their make-up, you’d think they were – you know, really nice. But if you went to their houses – well, you got such a land. Untidy, they’d be. Direty, even. I mean, the impression you got of those girls – there was nothing behind it.
to link someone somewhere: lch 171 If you linked her up the steps into the library … she would radiate happiness. (walked her up the steps, arm in arm)
only that: lch 126 The time my front tooth fell out when I had to record an interview in the morning and only that I was reading Jane Eyre and Jane had been so brave I would have succumbed to panic. (‘if I hadn’t been reading Jane Eyre’)
a pick of … ('a spot of', 'the least bit of'): lch 242 Or, that they had been beaten themselves, and that it hadn’t done them a pick of harm.
see: lch 345 Her whole send-off was so perfectly done that I asked a nephew, afterwards, to see could he arrange for me something like it – a modest, heartfelt, traditional, Dublin funeral. (‘to see if he could arrange …’)
sure: lch 208 “Sure you could easily go too,” she said to me.

How you can help this become a reality

In October 2007 we started adding further texts to both the Irish corpus and the corpus of Irish-English, to make them even more comprehensive and to ensure that they contain examples of any new words or terms which come into existence. In the coming months, we will be identifying possible sources of text for our two new corpora. Jo O’Donoghue, who is responsible for this activity, will then approach the copyright owners to request permission for these texts to be included in the New Corpus for Ireland. Please help her! If you are a writer, publisher, or newspaper editor, and you would like to see your text represented in the corpus, get in touch with Jo (at eolas@focloir.ie) and she will be happy to explain what this entails. There are two main things to remember, though:

first, the texts in the corpus are used simply as ‘raw data’ to help us build up a picture of the way words are really used. There is no question of large parts of your text being reproduced anywhere
secondly, when a text sample is included in a corpus, the text does not lose any of the legal protection offered by copyright law.

Acknowledgements

Foras na Gaeilge would like to sincerely thank all organizations and individuals who have previously supplied texts or who have contributed in other ways to the compilation of the Corpus. For a full list of contributors click here.