Duration until 2047Tamilex: New Academy Project on Classical Tamil Literature

16 November 2022

Photo: Eva Wilden

It is a milestone for classical Tamil studies: In 2023, the long-term project Tamilex will be included in the programme of the Academy of Sciences. Initiated by Eva Wilden, it will create the first comprehensive electronic corpus with a historical dictionary of key texts from the first millennium.

Southeast India is home to one of the world’s great literary traditions: with a history of over 2,000 years, Tamil is the second-oldest of India’s six classical languages besides Sanskrit. Nevertheless, this literary tradition has been insufficiently explored. Only fragments of it have been translated into other languages so far.

From January 2023, the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg will include a long-term project in its research programme that will make a significant contribution to securing and understanding the vast body of classical Tamil literature. In ‘Tamilex’, a comprehensive electronic corpus of the most important classical Tamil texts from the first millennium will be developed for the first time. On this basis, a bilingual historical lexicon will be created as well. All these materials will be made available to the scholarly community and the public in the form of interactive online tools. In this way, the work done in Tamilex can both be aggregated with contributions from related research projects, for example in Paris, and fulfil an important didactic function for the growing part of the Tamil community that is engaging with its linguistic heritage.

The project is led by Eva Wilden, who is the spokesperson of the Research Field ‘Multilayered Written Artefacts’ at the Cluster of Excellence. She is one of the few specialists in classical Tamil in Germany. Tamilex is crucially based on her extensive preliminary work, including critical editions, translations, and digital copies. With an endowment of four positions (two postdocs, one doctoral student, and one computer scientist) and a duration of 24 years, Tamilex now secures the future of Tamil studies at Universität Hamburg.

The Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities is the umbrella organisation of eight German academies of sciences and humanities. The collective research programme of the academies of sciences – the Academies Programme – serves to study, preserve and communicate global cultural heritage. It is currently the largest long-term research programme in Germany for foundational research in the humanities and social sciences and is coordinated by the Union of Academies. In 2023, it will include eight new projects in its highly competitive funding programme. With Beta maṣāḥǝft (on manuscripts from Ethiopia and Eritrea), Formulae-Litterae-Chartae (on formulaic writing in early medieval Europe), and Etymologika (on the organisation and interpretation of knowledge in Greek-Byzantine lexica), three projects at the Academy of Scienes and Humanities in Hamburg are already affiliated with CSMC.