Establishment of an electronic corpus of classical Tamil literature and the corresponding historical lexicon informed by emic exegetical and lexicographical sources
Links to the project
The early poetic anthologies of classical Tamil form part of the great literary heritage of mankind, even if they are still little known in the West. Just the first millennium comprises a tradition of erotic and heroic poetry, but also didactic, epic and devotional collections, along with a sophisticated systems of grammatical, poetical and lexicographical knowledge, which on the one hand was used to train apprentice poets and on the other hand served as the theoretical basis for the appreciation of the connoisseurs. Voluminous commentaries testify to the long-term effort of keeping these texts, so radically different from everyday language, alive and comprehensible. Until now there is no historical lexicon which would present the development of language and word meanings over the various domains and centuries.
One of the oldest surviving palm-leaf manuscripts of the Caṅkam corpus from Tiruvāvaṭutuṟai Ātīṉam, Caracuvati Makāl Library and Research Centre, taken by EFEO photographer G. RavindranEstablishment of an electronic corpus of classical Tamil literature and the corresponding historical lexicon informed by emic exegetical and lexicographical sources
Host Academy
Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg
Location and federal state
Hamburg, Hamburg
Type
Historical and Foreign Language Dictionaries
Project number
I.B.21
The project aims at establishing an electronic corpus of reliable texts of first millennium literature, where possible on the basis of critical editions along with complete concordances and corpus dictionaries which then can serve as the basis of a historical lexicon. Editions will also be printed, but the main goal is a bilingual interactive online tool (Englisch and Tamil) that allows direct engagement with the source texts, the exegetical materials and the lexicographic works, traditional and modern.
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