---
title: "The lemmatization of Old English Verbs from the second weak class on a lexical database (2015)"
description: "This paper builds one for the second class of weak verbs. 40 references."
authors: ["Marta Tío Sáenz"]
year: 2015
venue: "Journal of English Studies 13"
source: "https://publicaciones.unirioja.es/ojs/index.php/jes/article/view/2861"
doi: "10.18172/jes.2861"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Journal of English Studies)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/saenz-2015-lemmatization-old-english-verbs-second/"
---
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# The lemmatization of Old English Verbs from the second weak class on a lexical database

**Authors:** [Marta Tío Sáenz](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/marta-tio-saenz/) · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** [Journal of English Studies 13](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/the-journal-of-english-studies/) ([The Journal of English Studies 2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/the-journal-of-english-studies/2015/)) · **Publisher:** [University of La Rioja](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-la-rioja/) · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Journal of English Studies)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.2861) · [PDF](https://publicaciones.unirioja.es/ojs/index.php/jes/article/download/2861/2735) · [DOI 10.18172/jes.2861](https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.2861) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2518757494)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Most Old English dictionaries were built from limited source lists. The corpus-based Dictionary of Old English had only reached the letter G. As a result, no complete, text-grounded inventory of verb lemmas exists. This paper builds one for the second class of weak verbs. That class was chosen because its inflection changes only the suffix, and its endings are harder to confuse with class 1 weak verbs or strong verbs. The data come from the newest release of the Nerthus lexical database, whose dictionary entries are now connected to each occurrence found in the texts of the corpus compiled for the Dictionary of Old English (DOEC). The author selected eleven distinctive endings, covering infinitives, participles and several present and preterite forms. About 187,000 inflectional forms were searched for these endings, and each hit was assigned to an infinitive lemma. Spellings were regularized only through dialectal and diachronic correspondences. The result is 1,064 class 2 weak verb lemmas, 285 of which are missing from the Nerthus reference list, plus fixes such as verbs that need a ge- prefix. This tightens the link between surviving texts and dictionaries, especially for letters H–Y.

## Key points
- The new Nerthus setup, called The Grid, has five relational layouts:
  - the dictionary database Nerthus;
  - a word concordance to the DOEC;
  - a fragment concordance to the DOEC;
  - an index (Norna);
  - a reversed index (The Mirror).
- With The Grid, the record count grows from about 30,000 to about 3,000,000. Only Nerthus is openly accessible.
- The DOEC holds roughly 3,000 texts and about 3 million words. Nerthus headwords rest mainly on Clark Hall, with Bosworth-Toller and Sweet as secondary sources.
- Eleven endings were used as search keys, among them -ian, -ianne, -iende, ge-od, -ast, -iað/-iaþ, -ode, -odest, -odon and -oden. Around 187,000 inflectional forms were checked.
- The search produced 1,064 lemmas. Of these, 285 were new to Nerthus and were justified against Sweet and Clark Hall. Some existing lemmas, such as āmerian and langian, were found to require the ge- prefix.

## Interesting ideas
- The work starts lemmatization with the most morphologically transparent class and uses only endings that rarely collide with other paradigms, which keeps early results clean before harder classes are tackled.
- Spelling normalization is allowed only through a fixed set of principled correspondences (dialect and period variants), not through free fuzzy matching, so each regularization can be justified.
- A reversed index of word forms makes suffix-driven searches cheap, so whole inflectional classes can be pulled out of a large corpus at once.
- Corpus-derived lemmas are compared against an existing reference word list, and the gap (285 missing items) becomes a measurable finding, with each new lemma checked against independent dictionaries.
- A prefix such as ge- is encoded so that a simple verb links directly to its prefixed counterparts instead of being stored as an unrelated entry.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): The lemmatizer could apply unambiguous suffix rules first and defer ambiguous forms, logging which rule fired so every lemma stays explainable.
- **I2** (tokens): Variant spellings (British/American, archaic forms in fables) could map to lemmas only via an explicit whitelist of correspondences, each carrying its reason.
- **I3** (tokens): A reversed form index over our corpora would let us quickly collect candidates for a morphological class and spot unknown inflected forms.
- **I4** (learn): We could routinely diff lemmas induced from silver data against our lexicon and route unmatched items to verification by a second source before accepting them.
- **I5** (world): Derivational links like re- or un- verbs to their base could be stored as explicit relations in the compiled verb knowledge, so frames and verb classes can be inherited and traced.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Universidad de La Rioja](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universidad-de-la-rioja/) — University, Logroño, Spain · 13 works · 74 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Marta Tío Sáenz. 2015. The lemmatization of Old English Verbs from the second weak class on a lexical database. Journal of English Studies 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{saenz2015lemmatization,
  title = {{The lemmatization of Old English Verbs from the second weak class on a lexical database}},
  author = {Marta Tío Sáenz},
  journal = {Journal of English Studies 13},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.18172/jes.2861},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.2861}
}
```

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## References

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*Updated 24 October 2026*