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Publication

Review: Corus Besgnai: An Old Irish Law Tract on the Church and Society

2019-07, Qiu, Fangzhe

This volume contains a critical edition of the Old Irish law tract Córus Bésgnai (The Arrangement of Discipline), one of the constituent tracts of the late seventh-century compilation Senchas Már (The Great Tradition). It has taken the editor a very long time to bring this work to completion, but the result is a highly accurate and informative edition representing the highest standard of scholarship in early Irish language and law.

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Review: Language and Chronology: Text Dating by Machine Learning (Toner and Han)

2020, Qiu, Fangzhe

In 2015, two grants were awarded for projects using computational and statistical methods to date medieval Irish texts: one is provided by the European Research Council, which funds the project Chronologicon Hibernicum in Maynooth; the other is awarded by the Leverhulme Trust to fund Gregory Toner’s project ‘Dating of medieval texts through regressive analysis of the lexicon’ in QUB. The present book is the outcome of the latter project, in which the two co– authors explore computational methods previously unknown to the field of medieval Irish studies and demonstrate the huge potential such methods embody for the discipline. When one compares the title of the project to that of the book, it is apparent that Toner and Han have pushed the methodological boundary much further by transcending from regression analysis in the initial project idea to advanced machine learning techniques in the outcome.

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Publication

Old Irish aue 'descendant' and its descendants

2019-09-18, Qiu, Fangzhe

This paper intends to study the history of the Old Irish word aue 'descendant, grandchild' in both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The former approach tries to demonstrate what forms this word evolved into from the early Old Irish period up to the end of the Middle Irish period, and to establish the phonological changes it underwent in accordance with our present understanding of the history of the Irish language. The latter approach is based on a linguistically annotated corpus of the Annals of Ulster, and shows the distribution of variant forms of aue in relation to the period they are attested in. The discrepancy between the two observations is discussed and various hypotheses are raised to explain it.