Written sources are – like art and buildings – integral parts of the cultural heritage, whose preservation, indexing and provision are central social duties. The knowledge of the past is principally based on texts, that more or less accidentally escaped destruction. These records preserve the knowledge, the faith, the tales, the visions and dreams of the people. They give testimony of past…
The research project “Runische Schriftlichkeit in den germanischen Sprachen / Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS)” investigates the oldest writing system in the Germanic languages, the runic script. As a means of communication this script was used in different variants in large regions of Europe (with centres in what is now Germany and the Netherlands, in Great Britain and…
The Swiss Idioticon is an institute for the research and documentation of the German language and its dialects in Switzerland. Its main task is the development of the dictionary of the Swiss-German language (Swiss Idiotikon) in printed and digital form. This work describes Alemannic vocabulary in Switzerland from the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. It is the largest regional dictionary in…
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…
The staff of the project “Turfanforschung” edits central Iranian and old Turkic texts from the Turfanian text corpus (Turfansammlung). The texts of the “Turfansammlung” originated from the Central Asian oases along the silk road and date from the 7th to the 14th century CE. In the year 1902, the former Prussian Academy of Sciences received a considerable amount of texts from an expedition to East…