From Qualitative Collection to Quantitative Analysis: Normalizing an Ibero-Romance Historico-etymological Dataset

This paper describes the ongoing normalization of a historico-etymological dataset documenting the evolution of Obstruent + Lateral (OL) clusters (/pl fl bl kl gl/) in Ibero-Romance. Among the sound changes affecting these clusters in Romance, palatalization was the most prominent, yielding single palatal or post-alveolar segments or obstruent + palatal sequences. This process underwent a particularly unusual trajectory in Ibero-Romance, which is still not fully understood. To this end, a dedicated wordlist was compiled and analysed (García-Covelo, 2026b). Comprising 659 etymologies with attestations spanning the 8th to the 20th centuries, it represents the first comprehensive historical foundation for the study of OL clusters and their palatalization in Ibero-Romance, covering Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish together with their historical stages and regional varieties. Despite having been analysed in its original form (García-Covelo, 2025), the dataset’s single-table structure presents persistent challenges for querying and expansion, chiefly due to multi-valued fields, information redundancy, and label inconsistency. The ongoing normalization process addresses these issues by redistributing information across main, lookup, and junction tables. Key challenges discussed include the restructuring of the original dataset into three main tables, the design of lookup and junction tables, and the parsing of the sources_and_notes column, whose heterogeneous content requires extensive manual reorganization.