Mariarosaria Zinzi, Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy
Channel: Digital Classicist London Seminars
Date: 2021-11-12

Digital Classicist London Seminar (full programme: https://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2021.html)
Friday November 12, 2021, 17:00 (UK time/UTC)
Mariarosaria Zinzi (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models

The languages of ancient Italy are fragmentarily attested and documented almost exclusively in epigraphic texts. Recent advancements in information technologies would make it possible to make their data available both within and beyond the limits of epigraphy, philology, and historical linguistics. The project Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models is a multidisciplinary research initiative which involves a consortium established by the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, the University of Florence, and the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the Italian National Research Council. 

The main objective of the project is to investigate chosen  cultures of ancient Italy, namely Venetic, Oscan, Faliscan, and Celtic, on the basis of the relevant linguistic documentation, in order to show the forms of linguistic variability in Italy before romanisation. It will combine the traditional methods of epigraphy and historical linguistics with digital tools adapted to the highly fragmentary nature of the epigraphic documentation of such languages.

The expected results of the project are: 
– producing a searchable digital corpus of the inscriptions containing all the relevant contextual information together with their formal representation leveraging the TEI/EpiDoc encoding schema (may be necessary to create an ad-hoc schema for the peculiarities of such languages). This will ensure the interoperability with other digital corpora and, thus, their availability for the whole research community and the general public;
– creating a computational lexicon, linked with the corpus and based on a computational lexical model specifically dedicated to languages of fragmentary attestation;
– experimenting a semantic codification by means of CRMtex, the extension of CIDOC CRM, the de facto standard ontology in the DH, for the representation of the texts. 

The corpus will include for each inscription an edition of the text, contextual information, a commentary, a translation, searchable bibliographical references, and possibly photographs and drawings.