TOBAR NA GAEDHILGE 1.15

• What the results may look like

We begin by showing the results of some typical searches, and how to explore those results. We will later show how to request a search.

We may show sentences containing a selected Gaelic form, taking one example each from the Munster, Connacht and Scottish texts. Thereafter, we will draw our examples from the Ulster texts, which form by far the largest part of the material stored. (Contributions of Munster, Connacht or Scottish texts are most welcome.)

Figure 1: We looked in the Munster texts for examples of the form cábóg (a country person). We found two examples in Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, Na hAird Ó Thuaidh, and we show the second example here. Page and line reference is given to the published book.

The navigation panel (at upper right) allows us to move around the retrieved examples. The display panel (at lower right) allows the form in which the sentence is displayed to be controlled. These are described following Figure 6 below.

In passing, a small thing to notice in this example is the hyphen in "shráid-eanna". This shows that the token was hyphenated (at the end of a line) in the original book. But the hyphen is disregarded when indexing the sentence, as use of the Innéacsáilte display will confirm.

Figure 2: We looked in the Connacht texts for examples of the sequence of forms lúb gaoil (blood relationship), and we found two examples, both in Séamus Mag Uidhir, Fánaidheacht i gConndae Mhuigheo. We show the first sentence here.

Figure 3: We looked in the Scottish texts for examples of forms beginning with càr. With a request like this for forms matching a general pattern, clearly more than one form may match — we refer to this situation as matching a disjunction of forms. The sentences for each matching form are presented (over all the relevant books) before presenting the sentences for the next matching form. Here, we show a sentence containing the matching form càraich (fix).

Besides viewing complete sentences as above (View: Abairteacha (il-teangthach)), three other ways of viewing results are provided, which are more compact for large quantities of text. (The view can be chosen at the same time as the search forms are chosen.) Output from these views is shown in the next two figures.

Figure 4: Firstly, the frequency (Minicidheacht) view of the form saoghal (life) in the texts of the current collection.

Scrolling may be necessary to reveal the information for all the texts. If the request matched a disjunction of forms, a navigation option AthFhocal (next form) will proceed to the next matching form. A navigation option Réidh (finished) leaves the results and returns to the search screen.

Figure 5: Secondly, the keyword-in-context view (KWIC) of the form athair (father) in Séamus 'ac Grianna, Thiar i dTír Chonaill. The first batch of occurrences is shown.

In the KWIC view, the navigation panel at the upper right allows us to move down a screenful (Síos), up a screenful (Suas), to start of text (Suas go bárr), to end of text (Síos go bun). These options allow us to move around move only within the current text, and (for a disjunction of matching forms) only for the current form.

To move to the next book of the collection, we use AthLeabhar. If the request matched several forms in disjunction, AthFhocal will take us to the first book for next matching form. The Réidh (finished) option leaves the results and returns to the search screen. Some of the navigation options are provided with keyboard shortcuts, which may prove convenient for frequent use. (The AthThlámán option is equivalent to Síos.)

It is not currently possible to move to the previous book or to a previous matching form. But we can get back to the start of the retrieved results by choosing Réidh and returning to the results without altering the previous search request.

Figure 5a: Thirdly, the monolingual by sentence view (Abairteacha (aon-teangthach)) of the form athair (father) in Séamus 'ac Grianna, Thiar i dTír Chonaill. The first batch of occurrences is shown.

In the above Abairteacha (aon-teangthach) view, whole sentences are shown, rather than the single lines of the KWIC view. The number at the head of the list is (as usual) the count of tokens, not of sentences. The sentences are displayed in batches of around 40 sentences (the batch size may vary but we will use 40 for clarity in this description). The first batch of sentences is shown here, and the navigation panel allows us to move down a batch (Síos) or move to the start of text (Suas go bárr). In this view, navigation choices to move up a batch (Suas) or to move to end of text (Síos go bun) are not yet presently supported. As with other views, the options do not support moving back to a previous text, or (for a disjunction of matching forms) moving back to a previous form.

Returning now to the whole-sentence view which we saw in the first three figures, and which is the default view option, it is properly called the multilingual by-sentence view. Unlike the monolingual view, the multilingual view shows only one sentence at a time, but it offers additional options for the display of that sentence.

Figure 6: A multilingual by sentence view (Abairteacha (il-teangthach)) of the form oidhreógach (ice) in Seosamh 'ac Grianna, Pádraic Ó Conaire agus Aistí Eile. The first (and, as it happens, only) such sentence in this text is displayed.

Here, the navigation panel allows us to move to the next retrieved sentence (Síos), to the previous retrieved sentence (Suas), to the first retrieved sentence of the text (Suas go bárr), or to the last retrieved sentence of the text (Síos go bun). These options allow us to move around move only within the current text, and (for a disjunction of matching forms) only for the current form.

In either of the by sentence views, we use AthLeabhar to move to the next book of the collection. If the request matched several forms in disjunction, AthFhocal will take us to the first book for next matching form. The Réidh (finished) option leaves the results and returns to the search screen. Some of the navigation options are provided with keyboard shortcuts, which may prove convenient for frequent use. (The AthAbairt option is equivalent to Síos.)

It is not currently possible, in either of the by sentence views, to move to the previous book or to a previous matching form. But we can get back to the start of the retrieved results by choosing Réidh and returning to the results without altering the previous search request.

The extra facilities available in the multilingual by-sentence option are activated by the display panel at the lower right. Firstly, it allows the text of the sentence in the main language (ie. the language of the index in use) to be shown in a choice of ways: plain and uncorrected (Foillsighthe); plain but corrected (Lom); including mark-up (Marcáilte); or as a list of the tokens by which it is indexed (Innéacsáilte). The Innéacsáilte option allows you to see which index terms will fetch this sentence. This will allow you to see how the text has been tokenized and indexed.

(When using the Gaelic index with the Marcáilte option, an extra choice may be offered: AMH, POS (the default) or FGB. This choice may be disregarded here, and is explained later.)

To explain what is meant by "correction": this is limited to obvious errors. An isolated spelling variant which is at odds with consistent usage in the rest of the same book may also be corrected; but beyond this, we make no attempt at normalization of forms which are not clearly in error. Corrections to Gaelic text may also include restoring the wording of the manuscript where known. And correction of a text in a language other than Gaelic may be used to bring that text closer to the edition used by the Gaelic translater. None of these correction processes can be guaranteed to have been applied exhaustively. The corrections are applied to the indexes; and to the displayed sentences under the Lom option. The uncorrected book text will always be displayed under the Foillsighthe option.

As an example, the misprint cómhhartha occurs in Ben-Hur on page 337, and should clearly be corrected and indexed as cómhartha. So if we search for cómhartha, we will find the relevant sentence, and if we view it under the default Lom option, we will see the token as cómhartha. But if viewed under the Foillsighthe option, we will see it, uncorrected, as cómhhartha. Under the Marcáilte option, we will see the complete markup as cómh[h]artha. And under the Innéacsáilte option, we will see it confirmed that the token is indexed as cómhartha.

Secondly, in the multilingual by-sentence option, the display panel allows the translation of the sentence into languages other than that of the index to be shown, if stored. To do this, tick the names of the desired languages, visible in Figure 6 above, labelled Béarla (English) and Fraincis (French) and Gearmáinis (German) and Rúisis (Russian).

If the name of the language is italicised, this means that a translation in that language is not available for the sentence to be displayed. At present, translations or originals are held only for texts in the Ulaidh collection, and only for a proportion of this: English, 2.39M tokens; French, 0.90M tokens; German, 0.92M tokens; Russian, 0.14M tokens (these are the token counts in the Gaelic versions of the shared texts).

Figure 7: Sentences containing the form creafadaigh (shaking); the first of two examples found in Seosamh 'ac Grianna, Seideán Bruithne/Amy Foster. English and French translations are available and are shown.

When a sentence is shown in several languages, the choice of display between plain and corrected (Lom); including mark-up (Marcáilte); as a list of the tokens by which it is indexed (Innéacsáilte); or plain and uncorrected exactly as printed (Foillsighte) applies only to the language of the index used. In other languages the sentence is shown plain and corrected.

The page and line number is shown for the displayed sentence. The page and line number are taken from the edition used, and they can be displayed only if the computer-readable version of the text is paginated — see the list of texts below for this information. All the Gaelic texts are paginated, but some in other languages, texts which have been obtained from various sources may not be paginated.

Several other options on the navigation panel are common to the KWIC view and both the by-sentence views.

Cóipeáil (copy) copies the current display to a textfile, which by default, is called samplaí.txt and is placed in the My Documents folder, and the copied material is appended to it. Comhad Cóipeála (copy file) allows the name and location of the file to be changed, and also the mode from append to overwrite (but it will revert to appending after the first copy). The darker elongated panel shown in Figure 6 is the result of clicking Comhad Cóipeála. Copying by cut-and-paste is also supported.

Retrieval of a collocation may require the creation of workfiles. These will be placed in the temporary workspace folder, if possible. In the unlikely event that this is not possible, you will be prompted for the name of a folder to hold workfiles; you could, for example, place them on a memory stick.

• What Gaelic texts can be searched

Gaelic is found in several slightly different forms, and the texts are organized into collections to reflect this and to keep each collection fairly homogeneous in language.  The five collections supplied are (as of 2025/01/15):

• Ulaidh (Ulster)           Index: Gaedhilg. 17 authors;  75 books;  57,117 forms;  5,170,316 tokens
• Connachta                 Index: Gaedhilge.  8 authors;  10 books;  22,982 forms;    406,316 tokens
• Mumhain (Munster)  Index: Gaolainn.   6 authors;   6 books;  13,375 forms;    226,404 tokens
• Alba (Scotland)          Index: Gàidhlig.    4 authors;   5 books;    8,021 forms;   115,996 tokens
• Oirthear (Eastern)     Index: Gaodhlag.   2 regions;    3 books;    8,700 forms;  104,842 tokens

At the present stage of development, the Ulaidh collection is much larger than any of the others.

The identities of the texts in all collections are listed in full below.

Searching may be restricted to any chosen subset of the texts of a collection, by deselecting temporarily individual texts or authors.

Each collection has a pre-compiled index associated with it, made from the forms found in the relevant books, and in which requests for forms are looked up. The statistics just given for the collections refer to these indexes — indexes of forms found in the Gaelic texts. This does not mean that the forms in the index are exclusively Gaelic forms; rather they will reflect whatever the Gaelic texts contain, including borrowings, phrases and quotations in other languages.

Much more detail will be given later about what forms may be found in the indexes.

Figure 8: This is the program's opening screen, and the first task is to choose the desired collection and index.

The program should show a list of the available collections, as in blue above — together with some statistics of the selected collection (at the bottom) and a pick list of its index (on the right). If there are no collections listed, you may be in the wrong folder, and you can browse (using Cuirtear Lorg) to a different folder. The indexes available to the selected collection are shown in brown. When you have marked the desired collection and chosen your index to it, click on Isteach to enter the collection/index.

Amach is to exit the program.

Treoir is for help. Only a very early version of the help is available.

• Requesting Gaelic forms

In this section, we confine attention to the Gaelic-language indexes, and to the foirmeacha (forms) index. Foreign-language indexes will be described later, and lemmata (lemma) indexes later still.

When a collection has been selected, and Isteach clicked, the display changes to that shown in the next figure, which allows you to type forms and to choose a view, among other things.

Figure 9: Requesting Gaelic forms.

Before entering our own forms, however, first notice that this screen allows you to go back and change to a different collection and index, by using the Athruigh button on the Cnuasacht panel.

And also, that you may see which authors and books are included in the current collection and index by using the Athruigh button on the Leabharthaí panel, and you may choose to deselect temporarily any subset of those books. While a book is deselected, no material from it will be displayed. (Note that deselecting a book is not reflected in the pick-list of forms, which remains that for the whole collection. Likewise, frequencies are not recalculated.)

From the Radharc (views) panel, you may choose your view of the results: frequencies (Minicidheacht); a keyword-in-context concordance (KWIC); batched sentences (Abairteacha (aon-teangthach)); or single sentences with extra display options (Abairteacha (il-teangthach)). Samples of each view have already been shown above.

And now we come to the Focal panel, where the desired form or forms may be typed into the box provided, or may be inserted there by double-clicking them on the pick list, which is a displayed segment of the collection's index. The pick list accommodates itself to the existing contents of the box, as a guide to what words are available.

If typing into the box, any accented character should be pre-composed, not a combination — e.g. type á as normal, NOT a followed by a combining acute accent.

As an alternative to typing it into the box, a search form may also be chosen by double-clicking it on the pick list, or it may be pasted from the Windows clipboard (Ctrl/V).  The new form will be appended to anything already in the box (and which is not selected); if the existing material in the box is already selected — which is the default — the new search form will replace it. TIP: when working between the box and the picklist, you can cycle the focus around these and the other screen items by repeatedly pressing the TAB key. While an item has focus, any content which is selected will be visibly highlighted.

In the box you may put:
• a form, such as oidhreógach or saoghal or athair, as used in our previous examples
• two or more forms occurring together (eg. lúb gaoil)
• any form may contain a wild-card (*), that is, an asterisk which matches any number of letters, including none.  For example, all forms with a particular stem may be sought (eg. beir*), or all forms with a particular termination (eg. *stin).

If the box contains more than one form (ie. there is a space within it), you are asked to choose between seeking the forms directly adjacent and in the given order; or within the same sentence in any order. (Note however that the KWIC display mode is unsuitable when asking for non-adjacent forms; in this case, the monolingual by sentence mode is substituted.)

It is even possible to give one or more of the forms as simply the asterisk (*), which matches any form; the search is then assumed to be a consecutive one. (But avoid giving * as the final form, as the search will be unnecessarily slow.) As we will see below (under demutation) a hyphen is, in most circumstances, counted as a separate form, so search for sean-bhean as three forms: sean - bean (as well as sean bean and seanbhean to cover any unhyphenated instances).

You may tick the Gan beinn ar an tsíneadh fhada checkbox if you want to include forms which differ from that requested only by the presence or absence of an accent, eg. comhradh with this checkbox ticked will match comhrádh, cómhradh and cómhrádh as well. Actually, ticking this box also includes forms which differ from that requested:
• by the presence of ANY accent;
• by a difference of CASE, though this affects only lemma indexes and the German form index, as case differences are already neutralized in other form indexes;
• by the intrusion of certain non-alphanumeric characters, such as £, %, period (indicating abbreviation), apostrophe (indicating elision), hyphen (indicating anonymisation), etc. For example, 2 will retrieve also £2 or 2% or 2° or 2½; but note that many Gaelic forms containing apostrophes or hyphens are already treated as compounds and indexed as two or more separate parts, as explained under decompounding below.

To type accented vowels, use your normal method of doing this under Windows. For information about keying accented letters under Windows, look here, or see the section "Keyboards layouts" near the end of this file. (But you will not require the support for dotted consonants offered by these keyboards, as lenition is always indicated by suffixing the letter h in Tobar na Gaedhilge.) Your method of typing accented characters should result in precomposed characters, as most methods do, rather than in separate combining accents.

When all this is complete, you may click the OK button to produce the results.

Further hints on the choice of forms for searching will come in the next section of this document.

• More about what to expect in a Gaelic index of forms

Here are some pointers regarding what kinds of forms are worth requesting.

When a form is requested, it is matched against a pre-compiled index of forms from the chosen collection.  A scrolling alphabetic listing of the current index is shown, and will indicate what forms are available. For Gaelic, this index consists of forms which are aggregated in a number of ways to increase coverage:

• lowercased: the forms in a Gaelic index have been converted to lowercase by replacing any capital letters by small letters; this even applies to proper names. Any capital letters you include in your request will also be so converted.

• decliticised: common enclitics, such as d' in d'ól, or 's in 'seadh, or -sa in agam-sa, are treated as separate forms in the index (d' + ól; 's + eadh; agam + - + sa), and should also be detached in your request. Enclitics are normally signalled in running text by a hyphen or an apostrophe. But when there is no overt signal in similar cases (eg. agamsa, seadh), the splitting in the index will have been performed manually and is unlikely to have been exhaustive.

A number of common contracted forms have been indexed under their parts, e.g. 'na (from ina) under ' and a; 'na (from chun an) under 'n and a'; 'na (from chun na) under ' and na; ab (from a ba) under a and b, or under a and b'; gurab under gur and a and b; and many other similar cases. This aspect is to be made more rigorous.

• decompounded: very few forms containing a hyphen have been admitted to the indexes — a list of these can be obtained by searching for *-*. Rather, most hyphenated forms have been treated atomistically in the indexes, and are found by seeking their parts, including the hyphen, eg. leith-phighinn by seeking the three items leith and - and pighinn, with checking of the "consecutive" option ("Díreach i ndiaidh a chéile").

• demutated: initial mutations are removed from forms in the index; so, for example, fear, fhear and bhfear are all indexed as fear, while t-olc, n-olc and holc are all indexed as olc — but, where the mutation is permanent, it is retained, e.g. chugam, thart (in one of its senses), (go) dtí. You may have noticed the benefits of demutation and decliticisation in our athair example above. An initial mutation does not leave any trace in the index; and this is also true of any hyphen which is only part of an initial mutation. When typing Gaelic forms to be searched for, remember to remove initial mutations, unless they are a permanent part of the form. Removal of initial mutations may seem counter-intuitive when requesting a sequence of forms (eg. ár athair), but it is nonetheless required.

The forms in the Gaelic forms index are not lemmatized, ie. terminally inflected forms, such as fear, fir, feara, must be searched for separately — although the wild card may often be used to advantage to retrieve the several related forms in disjunction.

Finally, note that the index is based on the forms of the text after they have been subjected to a limited and controlled degree of correction, as explained just beneath Figure 6 above.

• Searching in other languages

As well as searching the textbase for Gaelic words, indexes have been created in four additional languages, based on the forms found in translations or originals in these languages of some of the Gaelic texts. As stated earlier, these translations/originals are at present confined to the Ulaidh collection, and cover only a proportion of it: Béarla (English), 2.37M tokens; Fraincis (French), 0.87M tokens; Gearmáinis (German), 0.85M tokens. There is also a tiny amount of Russian, 0.09M tokens.

Generally, such texts have been independently translated into Gaelic and into the other non-original languages; the original language in most such cases has been English, but there are examples of French (La Terre qui Meurt; Pêcheur d'Islande) and of Russian (Записки охотника). Translation of a Gaelic original is found only into Russian (extracts from Ó Neamh go h-Árainn and from Fallaing Shíoda).

Note that the Gaelic version of the text is considered pivotal. Consequently, substantial amounts of material omitted from a translation into Gaelic will not be included in other language versions of that text either. For example, the Gaelic translation of Turgenev's Записки охотника contains only about half the stories in the original, and only these stories will be included in other languages. Also, in the other language collections, texts are grouped according to the author or translater of the Gaelic version.

Figure 10: Search of the English index of the Ulaidh collection for the form bunch. An example is shown from Ben-Hur, and the English and Gaelic and French and German of the sentence is displayed.

Figure 11: Search of the French index of the Ulaidh collection for the form accroché. An example is shown from Iascaire Inse Tuile, and the French and Gaelic and English and German of the sentence is displayed.

Figure 12: Search of the German index of the Ulaidh collection for the form Knurren. An example is shown from Scairt an Dúthchais, and the German and Gaelic and English and French and Russian of the sentence is displayed.

Figure 12a: Search of the Russian index of the Ulaidh collection for the form лошадь. An example is shown from Scéalta Sealgaire, and the Russian and Gaelic and English of the sentence is displayed.

To search using another language, select the Ulaidh collection, and then the appropriate language. You will then have a further choice between Foirmeacha (forms) and Lemmata (lemmas), because a rough and ready lemmatization has been applied to the English, French, German and Russian texts, resulting in two indexes for each of these languages. The statistics for these indexes are, at 2025/01/15:

• Ulaidh (Ulster)         Index: Béarla (foirmeacha). 7 Gaelic writers; 23 books;     46,928 forms;    2,375,425 tokens
•                                   Index: Béarla (lemmata).  7 Gaelic writers;   23 books;   36,318 lemmas;    2,366,875 tokens
•                                   Index: Fraincis (foirmeacha). 3 Gaelic writers;  9 books;    34,709 forms;    869,635 tokens
•                                   Index: Fraincis (lemmata).  3 Gaelic writers;   9 books;    16,468 lemmas;    867,783 tokens
•                                   Index: Gearmáinis (foirmeacha). 4 Gaelic writers;  10 books;   52,982 forms;   847,353 tokens
•                                   Index: Gearmáinis (lemmata).  4 Gaelic writers;   10 books;    32,170 lemmas;   851,994 tokens
•                                   Index: Rúisis (foirmeacha). 3 Gaelic writers;  4 parts of books;  21,544 forms;   92,991 tokens
•                                   Index: Rúisis (lemmata).  3 Gaelic writers;   4 parts of books;  11,350 lemmas;  92,908 tokens

The form indexes for all languages except German are lowercased, even for proper names, and when typing a request, any uppercase letters are automatically converted to lowercase.

In the German form index, the initial letter of a noun (or a name) retains its case — actually, the initial letter takes its case from the lemma assigned to it, which is usually the same thing (lemmatization is discussed below); and when typing a request, case remains as typed. Only forms matching the case of the request are retrieved, unless the option Gan beinn ar an tsíneadh fhada is active, when forms which differ only in case will also be found.

In form indexes, enclitics are separated (eg. English 's, 've, n't, French l', m', German 's (gibt's), 'n (so'n)). Hyphenated words are generally decomponded, eg. French garde-robe; but this policy has not been consistently applied to English, where eg. decompounded water-tight is found as well as unitary water-tight and watertight. In the German index, decompounding of hyphenless words, eg. weiterfahren, has not been attempted.

• Citing Tobar na Gaedhilge

If you publish results which have benefitted from the use of Tobar na Gaedhilge, it would be appreciated if you would cite us among your sources. A suggested form of citation for this version is:

Ciarán Ó Duibhín, Tobar na Gaedhilge, version 1.15 (2025), Gaelic textbase and retrieval system for use under MS Windows, freely downloadable from http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/tobar/index.htm

• WARNING: Always check the sources

Although great care has been taken to make the textbase accurate, and it is constantly being improved, it is advisable not to draw linguistic conclusions without checking examples against the original printed matter. Remember that you should use the Foillsighthe display to see the original published text without any corrections at all, rather than the default Lom display which incorporates corrections and in a few cases takes account of the manuscript.

• Using Tobar na Gaedhilge on college networks

Colleges wishing to make Tobar na Gaedhilge available on their student computing networks are welcome to do so.

• Are some letters being displayed as "empty boxes"?

If this is happening, it may help to install on your computer the latest versions of the Segoe UI font (used for the alphabetic menu of available words) and the Consolas font (used for the results).

• Like to help? Here's how

The compiler intends to continue to add Ulster texts to the textbase. He would welcome volunteers to:

• prepare Connacht, Munster and Scottish texts for incorporation into the textbase
• prepare translations of Gaelic texts already in the textbase, into English or any other language

For guidance on how to prepare a text, see here, but the only thing that really matters is to put each book line on a separate line of the file. The rest of the process can be dealt with centrally.