this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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My work focuses on digitally processing texts from between 15th and 17th century in German. It's a pain and i look with envy to my colleagues working in English and French (around the same time). On the other hand, i like the challenge. :-)
I feel like 15th and 17th century German isn't that hard??
Like yeah, archaic words here and there. Lack of standardized grammar so you have to pronounce some words first.
Still, I can understand most of what Walther von der Vogelweide wrote in the 12th/13th century without too much difficulty. I think it'd take me a month to read fluently.
You probably missed the "digitally processing" part. Reading it isn't that difficult (still much more than french or english) but due to spelling variance and some other challenges it is mich more difficult to adapt existing models and architectures designed for modern German to premodern German.
In my case, working with administrative documents, there is also a problem concerning gerne-specific words (old terms for legal xoncepts basically) which for example are not well understood by systems created for modern German.
Oh right, I thought of digitally processing as just digitalizing which isn't quite the same.
Yeah, that sounds painful to attempt. I can imagine it's like trying to process German text today written in dialect (like the Bavarian Wikipedia).