print refresh

About the project

Aim | Funding | Programming | Feedback | Press

See also:

• About us
• Collaboration
• Contact

Aim

The aim of our project “A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts” (CEToM) is to provide an integrated corpus of already published as well as still unpublished Tocharian texts. While the traditional editions are often lacking translations and photographs of the manuscripts, in recent years images of many fragments have been made available online, first on TITUS and later also on IDP. Likewise, many of the old editions have been digitised, on TITUS and in Gerd Carling's Thesaurus of Tocharian A (in progress), and new fragments have been edited both on TITUS and on IDP. Starting out from these existing editions, both printed and online, our aim is to provide an edition that is comprehensive, uses a unified notation, informs on the chronological layer and the script type, and adds translation, commentary, a systematic metrical analysis, and a bibliography.

In addition, the texts are analyzed grammatically and, as far as possible, the morphological characteristics of each word are determined. In this way, the text corpus is made accessible for any kind of word or grammar search. It will be possible, for instance, to search for all genitive plural forms, or for 2sg. finite verbal forms. In the Advanced Search function it will also be possible to refine a search by limiting it to archaic texts, metrical texts, texts from a certain find spot or genre etc., or a combination of these.

We expect that the combination of an electronic edition with grammatical information and a sophisticated search function will not only be useful for linguistic inquiries, but also be of essential help in the decipherment and identification of problematic unedited fragments, not the least in the course of our own edition work.

Funding

This project is generously funded by the START Program of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (project number Y492) and hosted by the Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna.

Programming

The system is programmed in Perl 5. The automatically generated output is written in HTML 4.01 Transitional, encoded in Unicode UTF-8, additionally using CSS 2.1 for formatting. JavaScript is used only occasionally. The only major challenge the user's browser will encounter should therefore be the correct display of special characters.

Correct markup language has been checked with the validators of the W3C for HTML and CSS:

Nevertheless, since the displayed pages are composed dynamically, there may be some casual inconsistency. Please, feel free to report any error or flaw.

Feedback

We welcome any kind of user feedback, be it on practical matters concerning the website or comments on and questions about the edition. Please fill out the contact form or write an email to a project member.

CEToM in the press

There is an article about our project in the University newsletter of April 2012.