"This project aims to study:
• the semantic development of the vocabulary of the Arabic language,
• philological discourses on the semantic changes in the language in the classical Arabic philological tradition (8th-10th centuries A.D.), and
• the impact of Arabic philology in the wider historical and cultural context of the Judaeo-Arab neo-classical heritage (12th-13th centuries A.D.) and Christian-Arab intellectual history on the eve of modernity (19th century A.D.).
The project will explore the universal cultural significance and the pivotal role of language consciousness in the history of Arab culture. It will introduce a new dimension into the existing research on the Arabic language and Arabic philology, which until now have been studied without any comprehensive cultural and social contextualisation. The project will focus on the process of the transmission of Arabic poetry, which provides detailed evidence of the development of Arabic philological thought and its universal significance for the theological, philosophical, historical and linguistic discourses of Arab intellectual history. This project will document the transmission of early Arabic poetry and analyse its vocabulary in a systematic way for the first time. For this purpose it will create an Analytical Database of Arabic Poetry. This publicly accessible database will represent a ground-breaking contribution to European research on the Arabic language and the Arabic philological heritage, which so far lacks even such fundamental tools as an etymological dictionary of the Arabic language or a complete dictionary of Classical Arabic. The database will implement comprehensive analytical tools and will serve as a reference work for wider research on Arabic literature, history and culture. Thus, the project will create an integrative research platform for the history and semantics of the Arabic language—a subject indispensable for understanding the foundations of Arab culture past and present."