The FITS Team’s first official meeting on 05 November, 2014

With the arrival of two new research assistants, Joanna Kopaczyk (previously at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) and Benjamin Molineaux (previously at Oxford), as well as a new doctoral candidate, Daisy Smith, the work on the AMC’s From Inglis To Scots project has begun in earnest.  The four-year FITS project is funded by an important AHRC grant and will focus on the sounds and spellings of Older Scots.

The team is completed by the project’s principal investigator, Prof. Bettelou Los, two co-investigators, Rhona Alcorn and Warren Maguire, as well as a programmer and database manager, Vasilis Karaiskos.

The FITS project aims to account systematically for the diversity of spelling attested in varieties of Scots between 1380 (the date of the earliest materials) and 1500. It will thus refine and significantly extend current knowledge of the phonological history of Older Scots. Our dataset consists of spellings recorded in the corpus of tagged texts compiled for A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, I: 1380–1500 (LAOS). FITS will focus on spellings of morphemes of Germanic origin in particular.

Watch this space for more information on this exciting project!