More big medieval manuscript news!

We've had a recent post about the discovery of new Gothic manuscript material (here), a palimpsest, where earlier (Gothic) writing had been removed and new (Latin) writing done on the same surface, apparently found by Chiara Faraggiana di Sarzana from Bologna University.* Now we have a pretty cool bit of news from medievalists.net about how multispectral imaging is allowing the discovery of new writing, here (and image from there as well).

I'm not sure that these manuscripts are particularly interesting linguistically, but this has huge ramifications for people working with poorly attested medieval languages. I think those folks all assume that a lot more early medieval text exists than is current known and it doesn't take much to shake up the corpus for some of those languages.

*Recall that the new Gothic stuff was discovered in Bologna ... it's a happening place right now, I guess.

New fieldwork tool! iSLR Field Recorder

The Sociolinguistics Research Lab at the University of Victoria has just released a really nifty tool for fieldwork, especially sociophonetic fieldwork. It's an app for iPhone, iPad or iPod that …

allows you to record words or phrases prompted by your own text list (optionally randomized). Then, simply upload your recording session to your Dropbox account or Sync with iTunes. You can retrieve new wordlists from Dropbox, too!  

I saw a demo of an early version last year at NWAV by Alex D'Arcy (she developed it) and it was pretty slick then. I haven't tried it out yet, but can't wait.

Now, if they can develop an app that will get IRB approval for new projects, the future will be without limit.