Borrowed vocabulary (loanwords) can serve as evidence for cultural exchange that are embedded in the languages that we speak, but how can we use loanwords for reconstructing prehistoric cultural exchange when one or more of the languages has left no material record, or records that remain undeciphered?
To judge from the amount of vocabulary in Ancient Greek without inherited (i.e. transmitted from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European) it is clear that prehistoric language contact events played a significant role in the early evolution of the Ancient Greek language. These words are found in semantic areas which could be expected for an incoming linguistic community to borrow such as vocabulary for local landscape and weather phenomena and plants and animals, but also in areas that are indicative of how incoming Greek speakers integrated with and co-evolved pre-existing economic and societal structures and religious practices in the Aegean. The nature of the language contact scenario is, however, poorly understood since the languages that early Greek was in contact with left behind either no linguistic remains of their own, or only as yet undeciphered documents, which has made the identification and historical interpretation of these loanwords controversial in the literature.
The PHILOGLOSSA project aimed to bridge past approaches to prehistoric loanwords in Ancient Greek, make the materials more easily accessible and to advance new and more reliable methods for their identification and analysis. The first goal of the project was to create an open dataset of the materials alleged in the literature to be prehistoric loanwords from non-Indo-European sources that could serve as the basis for further analysis using large-data approaches. Importantly, this dataset was created to include contextual philological metadata to assist with the comparative analysis of the materials, as well as bibliographic references to key literature in order that it also be useful as a point of reference. The second major goal of the project was to use the dataset to devise methods for identifying linguistic features that could be used for classifying or diagnosing loanwords from common sources. Additionally, the project aimed at bridging gaps in the literature between historical linguistics and archaeology by explicitly including archaeological perspectives into the methodological analysis.
