Project Description

Between the 12th and 15th centuries, Romanic languages such as Old French, Occitan, Old Catalan and Old Italian played an important pioneering role in medieval (scholarly) knowledge communication and radiated out into all regions of Europe as transmitters of Arabic knowledge. The project aims to investigate the interaction between language and (scientific) knowledge. The field of observation is the Romanic cultural area, in which new vernacular knowledge networks emerged between about 1100 and about 1500. The project traces how medieval Italian, French, Occitan, Catalan and Spanish were developed into languages of (scientific) knowledge in the new, technically and conceptually complex functional areas. With the languages of (scientific) knowledge, not only an important component of Europe's cultural heritage is brought into focus. The Romanic languages are also important carriers of the cultural exchange that established the European identity as a knowledge society in the Middle Ages.

The project specifically combines methods of linguistics, text philology and history of (scientific) knowledge with the technologies of the digital humanities and ontology engineering. Using the latest digital methods, the rich Romanic tradition in the field of knowledge communication will be made accessible and digitally processed for historically oriented research in two exemplary text corpora on the domains of medicine and law. These supra-linguistic text corpora open up an important cultural area of medieval Romania and are the basis for the reconstruction of the central concepts and conceptual networks of the domains of knowledge.

A further innovative value of the project lies in the combination of the language-data-based and supra-linguistic approach with the means of ontology engineering: the essential goal is to transfer the historical-philological research results determined in the project into informatic domain-specific historised ontologies. The project will also use the ontologies for the innovative subsequent use of relevant lexicographic resources from other academy projects, such as the Dictionnaire onomasiologique de l'ancien gascon (DAG), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français (DEAF), Dictionnaire de l'occitan médiéval (DOM) and Lessico etimologico italiano (LEI).