In the neighbourhood of Dubrovnik

One of many nice capabilities of PhiloLogic text search system is the collocation table. It shows which words occur most often in the proximity of our search string.

So we gave PhiloLogic an interesting problem. There are many Latin names for the city of Dubrovnik, and even more ways to write these. We wanted to find all of them with a single search, and to see the words which co-occur with all these names.

The search string was:

epI[dt]aUr.*|rh?a[gc]Us.*|dUbr.*. 

(capital U's and I's to find u and v, i ans y)

The result is [here], nicely shortened by Google Shortener into goo.gl/PofAI.

What do we learn from the search? That Dubrovnik is an urbs and a ciuitas, that it has principatus and nobiles and senatus. Not much surprise here.

The interesting move is to compare Dubrovnik with Split (Spalatum: [X]). It can be seen at once that there ecclesia and archiepiscopus feature much more prominently.

And so on, until the map is complete.