Project description
How ancient writers composed Greek papyri
The 60 000 Greek papyrus texts, dating from 300 BCE to 800 CE, offer a unique opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-scholarly writers in antiquity. The ERC-funded AnCor project will analyse scribal corrections in Ancient Greek across various levels of language production, including spelling, morphology, semantics, and phraseology. The goal is to understand how ancient writers composed their texts and what they considered mistakes by examining the corrections made by the writers themselves. The project will create an annotated open-access database of ancient corrections in Greek papyri from Egypt, compare different genres and writers, and provide a new perspective on the Greek language in everyday use.
Objective
This project aims to transform the study of the Ancient Greek language by shifting the focus away from famous literary authors towards the language as it was produced in everyday life. The large corpus of 60.000 Greek texts written on papyrus between 300 BCE and 800 CE provides an important source for our knowledge of the ancient world and offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-scholarly writers in antiquity. In order to really change our views of what ‘correct’ Ancient Greek should look like, we need to take a different perspective: the perspective of the ancient writer. What did the writers perceive as a mistake? How did they compose their texts? In order to answer these questions this project employs an innovative resource: the corrections made by the ancient writers themselves.
A multidisciplinary team of three researchers and a student-assistant will analyse scribal corrections at different levels of language production (from spelling and morphology to semantics and phraseology) across a range of different genres (contracts, petitions, letters and lists) with the following three key objectives:
(1) to create an annotated open-access relational database of ancient corrections in Greek papyri,
(2) to study the production of Greek spelling from below, as corrected by the ancient writers themselves, comparatively in different genres, written by writers from diverse backgrounds,
(3) to identify the stage of composition of a textual object and make this category an integrated part of the analysis of historical textual artifacts, such as papyrus documents.
This will give us a unique perspective at the Greek language and allow us for the first time to study what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the Postclassical Greek language in daily practice. The outcomes of this project will change how we perceive non-scholarly writers and thereby contribute to a new and more inclusive perspective on ancient societies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistoryancient history
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studieshistory of literature
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands