The Egyptian-Coptic language is the human language with the longest documented lifetime, clocking at 4,500 years prior to its extinction. Its vocabulary reflects the knowledge and worldviews of one of the formative cultures of the ancient world. In order to explore the linguistic and cultural evidence of this historical episteme, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and…
The early poetic anthologies of classical Tamil 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…
The project “Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya (TWKM)” is funded with 5,42 Million Euros and is set to run for 15 years. It is located at the institute for Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology of the University Bonn. The project manager is Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube, who is an internationally renowned expert in the field of Maya research and a member of the North…
Human evolution is a story of expansions. During the last two million years the genus Homo spread from Africa into Asia and Europe in several waves of migration. New species developed and old groups became extinct (range expansions). As early as three million years ago, hominins had established new ways of dealing with their specific environment through culture. Stone tools produced with the help…
Three competing Reformation paradigms emerged in the city of Strasbourg, the duchy of Württemberg (with Tübingen university), and the Electoral Palatinate (with the university of Heidelberg) in the second half of the sixteenth century: an “upper German”, a Lutheran, and a Reformed model, respectively. Each of the three emphasized its distinctiveness, but was inevitably influenced by the other two.…
The task of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) project is to compile the first comprehensive scholarly dictionary of ancient Latin from its beginnings until 600 CE. The work is based on an archive of approximately 10 million slips, which takes account of all surviving texts and is constantly updated. The older texts are covered word for word, the later ones mostly with a selection of…
The dictionary of the Tibetan written language has been published at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2005. Its particular scientific significance is that it illustrates the development of the Tibetan vocabulary from a historical perspective. In this reference dictionary, original texts are systematically cited for the first time and translated into German. Representative…
TREE (Transitions from education to employment) is a nationwide, longitudinal survey on the transition of young people from school to adult life (transition). The study focuses on the educational and employment pathways after leaving compulsory school. The first sample (TREE1) comprises more than 6,000 young people who participated in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)…
Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) is one of the most important authors of German in the era of two-state identity. His novels tell of German history in a context far beyond Germany. With his essays and articles, Johnson developed the position of a “public intellectual”. His highly literary correspondence is on an equal footing with the literary work, commenting critically on post-war history in an…
The Vocabolario dei dialetti della Svizzera italiana (VSI) (Vocabulary of the dialects of Italian-speaking Switzerland) was founded in 1907 on the initiative of Carlo Salvioni and joins the similar works dedicated to the other three linguistic regions of the Confederation, the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, the Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande, and the Dicziunari rumantsch grischun, with the…
Together with the Walther Meissner Institute (WMI), the Commission for Cryogenic Research operates an internationally important centre for cryogenic research and technology, which forms the nucleus for numerous scientific and technical developments.
Max Reger (1873-1916) has left us, both in terms of expansiveness and complexity, with a monumental oeuvre. Apart from operas, his works encompasses all contemporaneous genres – chamber music, piano compositions, choirs, orchestral pieces and choir symphonies. Especially remarkable are, for a designated pioneer of new music, his work with organs as well as his revisions of other composers’ works,…
The Buddhist cave complexes in the region of Kucha, located on the northern Silk Road (in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China), house impressive wall paintings dating approximately from the 5th to 10th century. These are now, for the first time, being documented, studied, and made digitally accessible. In a project of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, research…
The meaning of Old Uyghur or Old Turkish is comparable to Latin in the Romanic languages. However, a state-of-the-art dictionary of this language does not yet exist. But since January 1, 2017, a research project under the supervision of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences has begun to create a dictionary of Old-Uigurian /Old-Turkish.
The Turkish people of today’s Uyghurs are not in a position to…
ZEPPELIN is a longitudinal intervention study with randomized control trial (RCT) research design: parents of infants from 132 families in difficult circumstances were visited at home every two to three weeks during three years within the framework of the program "PAT - Learning with Parents" (PAT). They were compared with infants from 116 socially burdened families without a support programme. It…