Student Research

Project Graff: An Old High German database

Project Graff is a research group at UW-Madison, formed in spring semester 2007 to build an electronic inventory of attested Old High German (OHG) word forms. The group is comprised entirely of graduate students, with some consultation from Professor Joseph Salmons; eventually they plan to apply for funding, but so far they have all worked on a voluntary basis. Initially the project's main focus was to establish an extensive and reliable empirical basis for work on OHG noun forms, but the group is now working to broaden the inventory's analytic capabilities, and spin-offs are extending it to closely related Germanic languages.

Key to this project is the compilation of a relational database that allows scholars to systematically retrieve all attestations of any given noun form found from the OHG period. The attestations being entered into the database are drawn primarily from E.G. Graff's seminal Althochdeutscher Sprachschatz, completed in 1846. Graff's work is particularly valuable because he worked to faithfully record each attestation, often working directly from manuscripts. Each entry in the database contains grammatical information, such as case and number, and philological background, like the source text and relevant dates of attestation (when known).

The database already contains over 26,000 attestations and continues to grow as the working group enters and checks new data. The project's goal is to utilize all available data in understanding the language spoken during the OHG period, and preliminary research has yielded new insights into noun class membership, the reduction of unstressed syllables, and the marking of umlaut.