Variantums kā konvertācijas izaicinājums: Georga Manceļa tekstu atveide mūsdienu rakstībā
Variation as a Challenge for Conversion: Presenting Texts by Georg Mancelius in Modern Spelling

Summary/Abstract: The spelling of the early written sources forms a major obstacle for modern users to explore them. The Corpus of early written Latvian (www.korpuss.lv/senie) developed in 2002 covers 74 sources from the 16th–18th cc. One of the steps towards modernising the corpus is the development of a mechanism that can handle searches in modern spelling. The corpus modernisation is performed by researchers from the Institute of the Latvian language, UL and the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, UL. The aim of the article is to present the development of conversion rules for the sources by one particular author, G. Mancelius, which show a great variety of spelling. The data of the study are seven printings which represent different stages of the author’s writings – ‘Lettisch Vade mecum’ (Manc1631_LVM), ‘Lettische geistliche Lieder vnd Psalmen’ (Manc1631_LGL), ‘Das Haus=, Zucht= vnd Lehrbuch Jesu Syrachs’ (Manc1631_Syr), ‘Die Sprüche Salomonis’ (Manc1637_Sal), the dictionary ‘Lettus’ (Manc1638_L), ‘Ten conversations’ (Manc1638_Run) and ‘Lang=gewünschte Lettische Postill II’ (Manc1654_LP2). The introduction to the article provides an overview of previous research on G.Mancelius’ orthography, which is usually quite brief and lacks any analysis or comparison of individual sources or different phases in Mancelius’ works. The study was conducted by means of the descriptive analytical and the philological method. A case study of two problematic ambiguous graphemes (, ) and one problematic set of graphemes () is presented, showing changes over time and seeking out the best conversion solutions for each case. The conversion was implemented according to 3 groups of laws: 1) graphemic, used for individual graphemes or sets of graphemes, either with or without regard for their position in the word; 2) morphemic, used for certain grammatical morphemes (prefixes, suffixes, flections); 3) lexical, which convert individual lexemes or their stems. The conversion shall be performed in the following order: 1) lexical; 2) morphemic; 3) graphemic laws. On the basis of the chronological study of individual graphemes, a brief description of the development of G. Mancelius’ orthography is presented in the final part.

• Details
• Contents