Phonological Soundscapes in Medieval Poetry

Christopher Hench


Abstract
The oral component of medieval poetry was integral to its performance and reception. Yet many believe that the medieval voice has been forever lost, and any attempts at rediscovering it are doomed to failure due to scribal practices, manuscript mouvance, and linguistic normalization in editing practices. This paper offers a method to abstract from this noise and better understand relative differences in phonological soundscapes by considering syllable qualities. The presented syllabification method and soundscape analysis offer themselves as cross-disciplinary tools for low-resource languages. As a case study, we examine medieval German lyric and argue that the heavily debated lyrical ‘I’ follows a unique trajectory through soundscapes, shedding light on the performance and practice of these poets.
Anthology ID:
W17-2207
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCH
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
46–56
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2207
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2207
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christopher Hench. 2017. Phonological Soundscapes in Medieval Poetry. In Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 46–56, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Phonological Soundscapes in Medieval Poetry (Hench, LaTeCH 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2207.pdf