DEMel

The Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel) is a semantically pre-structured and lemmatized database dedicated to the Medieval Spanish. The basis is the digitized archive of the Diccionario del Español Medieval (DEM), which was discontinued at the end of 2007 for financial reasons. With more than 600 literary and non-literary works or collections of texts and documents as sources, the material represents the Spanish vocabulary from the 10th to the beginning of the 15th century.

The project Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), funded by the German Research Foundation, aims to create a lemmatized and semantically pre-structured electronic data archive on medieval Spanish that is freely available and searchable on the Internet. Based on the digitized archive of the renowned Diccionario del Español Medieval (DEM), it provides access to over 31,000 lemmas with about 650,000 attestations from the 10th to the beginning of the 15th century.

In the course of digitization and indexing, approximately 865,000 paper slips - including around 700,000 slips on which the medieval word forms are written with their respective context of use, the source and their dating as well as, for example, grammatical, semantic and etymological information - were first scanned. Afterward, the project team developed a database structure and recorded the information contained on the paper slips manually.

The DEMel web portal developed at the University of Rostock now offers users the opportunity to evaluate the material in a structured manner according to their individual research questions using several search and filter functions. The great diversity of topics and text types covered by the underlying corpus (fiction, religious and legal documents, technical and scientific treatises on astronomy, mineralogy, botany, etc.) makes it possible to examine previously unrecorded aspects of medieval Spanish vocabulary. This makes the web portal a valuable source of information for Hispanists as well as for scholars from other disciplines (e.g. Arabic and Jewish studies, theology and Latin studies).