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CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

Photo: Karsten Helmholz

Research

Exploring Multilingual Written Artefacts

The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, Egypt, 2nd c. BCE. The stela was inscribed in two languages and three scripts, namely in Ancient Egyptian in hieroglyphs and in Demotic, as well as in Ancient Greek written in Greek script. © Hans Hillewaert. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

Research Field H

Multilingual written artefacts provide tangible evidence for linguistic and cultural interactions. They might be embedded in various social domains, such as administration, education, religion, trade, or family life. They emerge where people have the capacity to speak and write in more than one language or where, for example, settings of diglossia or bilingualism demand the use of more than one language. In other cases, multilingual written artefacts resulted from the circulation of written artefacts, or, from later additions in one or more different languages. These categories, which may overlap, demonstrate the diversity of the research objects, including but not restricted to manuscripts and inscriptions.

This Research Field aims to develop a general framework for the study of multilingual written artefacts, exploring variables and constants of their visual organisation as well as related cultural and social practices, and propose methodological principles that will set up a basis for comparative research. It pursues a cross-disciplinary approach combining manuscript studies, epigraphy, textual criticism, linguistics, palaeography, and computer science.

Spokesperson: Szilvia Jáka-Sövegjártó