Long-term Project Tamilex: Historical Tamil Dictionary

The early poetic anthologies of classical Tamil, going back to about the beginning of the Common Era, 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. Up to date there is no historical lexicon which would document the development of language and word meanings.

Goals

• an electronic corpus, accompanied by annotated translations and complete analytical glossaries for every word and its derivations
• critical editions interlinked with the existing digital manuscript corpus where ever possible
• a historical lexicon informed by commentary glosses and traditional lexicons endowed with crossreferences to the current modern dictionaries

Project Description

The project aims at establishing an electronic corpus of reliable texts (metrical and word-split) 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 material 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.

The Long-term Project is funded in the framework of the Academies Programme, which is coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

The Long-term Project is being implemented at the department for the Culture and History of India and Tibet of Universität Hamburg as part of the co-ooperation of the academy and the university.