THE MACHINE READABLE VERSION OF THE TAIN BY THOMAS
KINSELLA
TECHNICAL BRIEFING

     This is a computerised version of The T…in (Kinsella
1969). It is an English translation of the Old Irish
epic T…in B• C—ailnge. While the book includes also some
related tales, only the T…in proper (pages 52-253) has
been taken into consideration.
     The original T…in has also been computerised, (see
OTA catalogue) together with its translation. Care has
been taken to follow the same criteria in coding the
text: of course, being the two languages so different,
this has been not always possible.
     The basic text has been modified in a number of
ways, in order to make it suitable for the analysis by
the program called OCP (Oxford Concordance Program). This
program produces indexes, wordlists, and concordances of
texts. It is advisable to consult OXFORD CONCORDANCE
PROGRAM-USERS' MANUAL, Oxford University Computing
Service, for a more complete explanation of its usage and
a detailed insight of the reasons of the editorial
changes. Here follows their list.  

LETTERS
     All the 26 letters of the English alphabet appear in
the text. The original upper and lower cases letters of
the text have all been changed to lower case. Capital
letters used as a graphic convention (after a full stop,
a question or exclamation mark, and the inverted commas)
are not marked at all. They could be a problem for some
computers, and their purpose for the analysis is void.
Capital letters used for proper names and place names are
instead marked thus: 
          * names of persons or animals.
          & placenames.
          ^ others (names of festivals, dates, titles).
            foreign words in italics (# Irish, Latin).
     This makes possible to have a compact list of those
terms, distinguish them from possible omographs and
examine them separately.
     Exception to this rule are some proper names.
Sometimes a name is to be considered as a whole, but is
composed of more than one word, the components are united
in a single word (i.e. without blanks); the constituent
parts are distinguished by retaining their capital
letter. This again enables the terms not to be dispersed
in their alphabetical position in a wordlist. 
The criterion to unite words is such: only names of
people, of places, or written in italics, and only if ALL
the components are in Irish.
     e.g.  Mac Roth     becomes   *macRoth. 
           Ai Plain     becomes   &ai &plain

DIACRITICS
 
     In the text there are many Irish proper names, spelt
according to the rules of that language (even though
Kinsella simplified some elements). Since the Old Irish
vowels are ten, five long and five short ones, the long
vowels are marked by an accent, called fada. The fada is
coded as an oblique bar / after the letters it refers to.

     The apostrophe, the brackets  and the hyphen to join
compound words,  all stay as they are.   
     IMPORTANT: to simplify the sorting under headwords,
the 's of the genitive has been typed as 5, and the n't
of the negation as 9 (and those has been classified as
diacritics). Excepiton: can't and won't stay as they are.


PUNCTUATION

     The basic punctuation stays the same; full stop,
comma, colon, semicolon, question and exclamation mark. 
     The hyphens used to break a word in two at the end
of line have been abolished; the whole word has been
recomposed and typed at the beginning of the following
line. 
     The simple inverted commas become double ("), and
the doubles (used to mark speech inside somebody else's)
become |. 
          e.g. Fergus said: " Cu/ Chulainn said : | I   
                        will beat any warrior | " .
Sometimes the double inverted commas are used not as
before, but to give explainations. They are marked
differently, with a %. 
     The dash is made with two hyphens together (--). 

REFERENCES

     These are special markers not found in the printed
text, which are useful to delimit, exclude or isolate
portions of the text. 
     The titles of the chapters (invented by Kinsella)
are between curly brackets.
     The poetry is between double square brackets [[ ]]. 
     In same sequences of poetry the speaker is not
specified in the original. Cues provided by Kinsella are
enclosed between square brackets [ ].
      <T Kinsella>  defines the text's title. Present
only once, at the beginning, it assigns the whole text to
it. 
<L numbers> defines the line numbers in the printed page.
It is initialised (L=1) at the beginning of each page. 
<C numbers> defines the chapter. 
<P number-number>  Page   number   of   the  printed  
edition (KINSELLA 1969), and of the pages in succession
first to last (without illustrations), respectively. 
<M number>  Page number of the manuscripts (U, Y, LL).