Henrik Ibsen:
Introduction to the Web Edition
Henrik Ibsen:
There is a short introduction to Henrik Ibsen’s writings and his orthography.
By means of the material, it is possible to search well-known plays and a collection of poems, a total of 630,00 extant words. The text, rendered in Ibsen’s original orthography, is taken from the centenary edition (Hundreårsutgaven) published in 1928.
It is possible to search complete words such as vinløv or storfolk, parts of word, for example, those beginning with trold or ending in mand, phrases such as stykkevis og delt, gaa udenom or words that are closely connected, for example, vær and selv. The search will give the name of the poem or the play in which the text occurs; in the plays, information is further given about who speaks the line and to whom it is addressed. A search can be limited to a definite play or to lines spoken by a particular person.
The texts can be searched on the basis of specific words, i.e., word forms (specified, inflected or conjugated forms, e.g., of nouns and verbs). If all forms of a word are desired, e.g., of bad, all the forms must be given in the search--bad, badet, badets, bade. Some of these word forms are homographs, that is, they belong to different word classes, e.g., bad as a noun and bad as a verb.
It is also possible to scroll through the word lists of about 33,000 word forms and 19,000 lemmas used by Ibsen. Distinct occurrences of the words can be obtained from the word list.
Some statistics have been made available, for instance, an overview of words used most frequently and an overview of how frequently certain word classes are used in the various works. Some of these statistics have been previously published in Henrik Ibsens ordskatt (Henrik Ibsen’s Vocabulary).
As an aid for those who are are unfamiliar with Ibsen’s orthography (which changed radically midway through his authorship), an overview has been provided of modern Norwegian spelling referring to Ibsen’s orthography, and also of Ibsen’s early orthography in relation to the one he used in the latter part of his authorship.