Project Details
Projekt
From Latin to French: Compilation and analysis of a digital corpus of late Latin and old French texts
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
from 2015 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265325513
It is well known that the reconstructions of Historical-Comparative linguistics cannot establish any direct link between the first Romance texts and late Latin. There is a void between 'Proto-Romance', reconstructed through the comparison of the Romance languages, and late Latin, transmitted by written records, which makes it impossible to derive the Romance structures directly and completely from the Latin ones. It is not a chronological gap, because late Latin and the Romance varieties coexist in the common late antique and early medieval spheres of communication, but rather a functional division which stems from the complementarity of (Latin) as a language of communicative distance and (Romance) varieties employed for communicative proximity. The project in question seeks to investigate this complex relationship by examining in detail the evolution from (late) Latin to the varieties of old French. Researchers of both Latin and Romance linguistics will aim to shed light on the transition between the two language systems from the two respective disciplines. The project unites three teams:(i) The German team brings in its linguistic expertise in the field of late Latin. Based on digitised texts from the collections of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, an annotated Latin corpus will be compiled in collaboration with specialists from Media Informatics. Moreover, techniques of digital mark-up for registers and digitally based conceptual profiling of texts and their sections are to be developed.(ii) The Lyon team will further build on its experience in constructing electronic corpora of old French (Base de français médiéval). The researchers will merge the already existing old French and the nascent Latin corpus and provide a joint presentation and parallel query options. In addition, the team will be compiling a bilingual corpus of old French translations of Latin texts.(iii) The Lille team coordinates the analysis of this bilingual corpus by an already established research group, which brings together Latinists and researchers of the history of old French. This group uses the data supplied by the project for a handbook dealing with the transition from late Latin to old French. In so doing, the strategies of analysis and annotation pursued can be directly assessed in view of their usability and their ergonomic profile.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
France
Cooperation Partners
Professorin Anne Carlier; Professorin Dr. Céline Guillot
