ECCE – Evolution of Consonant Cluster in English

ECCE (short for Evolution of Consonant Clusters in English) is a project conducted in cooperation between the Department of English of the University of Vienna and the ACDH.

The Evolution of Consonant Clusters in English (ECCE) database represents the largest diachronically layered collection of English word-final consonant clusters such as /nd/ in hand – phonologically speaking highly marked structures which are nevertheless abundant in English. The data are derived from two corpora – the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English, and range from the 12th century to the beginning of the 17th century, thus spanning a period of more than 500 years.

One of the main purposes of this project is to produce an interactive database of English word-final consonant clusters – phonologically speaking highly marked structures which are nevertheless abundant in English.

The role of the ACDH in this project was to transform the already existing database into a web-application. The ECCE-App, built upon Django, a Python web framework, was created by Peter Andorfer and Ksenia Zaytseva in order to present the data from the ECCE project in an interactive and user-friendly format, allowing users to browse, search, filter and visualise the data according to their research interests.