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About the project

Aim

The aim of our project “A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts” (CEToM) is to provide an integrated corpus of already published as well as still unpublished Tocharian texts. While the traditional editions are often lacking translations and photographs of the manuscripts, in recent years images of many fragments have been made available online, first on TITUS and later also on IDP. Likewise, many of the old editions have been digitised, on TITUS and in Gerd Carling's “Thesaurus of Tocharian A” (in progress), and new fragments have been edited both on TITUS and on IDP. Starting out from these existing editions, both printed and online, our aim is to provide an edition that is comprehensive, uses a unified notation, informs on the chronological layer and the script type, and adds translation, commentary, a systematic metrical analysis, and a bibliography.

In addition, the texts are analyzed grammatically and, as far as possible, the morphological characteristics of each word are determined. In this way, the text corpus is made accessible for any kind of word or grammar search. It will be possible, for instance, to search for all genitive plural forms, or for 2sg. finite verbal forms. In the Advanced Search function it will also be possible to refine a search by limiting it to archaic texts, metrical texts, texts from a certain find spot or genre etc., or a combination of these.

We expect that the combination of an electronic edition with grammatical information and a sophisticated search function will not only be useful for linguistic inquiries, but also be of essential help in the decipherment and identification of problematic unedited fragments, not the least in the course of our own edition work.

Funding

This project was generously funded by the START Program of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (project number Y492) from February 2011 to January 2017. It is currently maintained by the Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna.

Feedback

We welcome any kind of user feedback, be it on practical matters concerning the website or comments on and questions about the edition. Please use the contact form.

CEToM in the press

• University newsletter April 2012.
• Wiener Zeitung, June 27, 2013.
• Der Spiegel, July 8, 2013.
• Antike Welt. Zeitschrift für Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte 5/2013.
• scilog – the magazine of the Austrian Science Fund FWF (video interview with Melanie Malzahn), August 6, 2018.

Events

• Tocharian Texts in Context. International Conference on Tocharian Manuscripts and Silk Road Culture. 2013.