Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HUNAYNNET (Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic)

Teaser

The general objective of the project HUNAYNNET is to study the late antique and medieval translations into Syriac and Arabic of ancient Greek philosophical and scientific works. It is well known that medieval Europe received ancient Greek science and philosophy through Latin...

Summary

The general objective of the project HUNAYNNET is to study the late antique and medieval translations into Syriac and Arabic of ancient Greek philosophical and scientific works. It is well known that medieval Europe received ancient Greek science and philosophy through Latin translations many of which were prepared on the basis of the Arabic and Hebrew versions of those works. It is perhaps less well-known that the Arabic translations, which appeared from the 8th to the 10th centuries, were made to a great extent either by means of or directly from Syriac versions of these Greek treatises. Greek scientific and philosophical literature as well as its Latin translations has been the object of scientific research for several centuries. The Arabic versions of these works have been published and actively studied over the last decades, and these efforts have yielded considerable results. The Syriac translations of Greek science and philosophy, on the contrary, remain practically unstudied and virtually neglected in modern research. Although it is generally accepted that the Syriac translations constitute a bridge between the Greek Hellenistic culture of Late Antiquity and their reception in medieval Islam, their actual contribution to areas such as the creation of methods for the translation of scientific literature into Semitic idiom have not so far been systematically investigated. This is a problematic situation since without taking into account translations into Syriac one cannot study properly the transmission of Greek heritage through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Thus, the Syriac tradition remains the “missing link” in the transmission of Greek texts to the Latin West.

Named after Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (ca. 808–873), the central and most prominent figure in the history of scientific translations from Greek into Syriac and Arabic, the online corpus HUNAYNNET will serve as an open-access platform for research into the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical literature in Syriac and Arabic. HUNAYNNET will present an indispensable, but until now missing, instrument for filling a large gap in our knowledge of the transmission of Greek science. The web-portal will be designed not only for specialists in the field, but also for a broad spectrum of scholars who are interested in the history of culture and philosophy and in translation studies, more generally.

The principal aim is to create an online aligned corpus of Greek texts and their Syriac and Arabic translations which will serve as a platform for multi-purpose study in the history of science, medicine and philosophy, the transmission of scientific vocabulary, and translation techniques.

The ambition of HUNAYNNET is to contribute to the study of both western and eastern pre-modern texts and language through computational tools. Partnering with other projects, we aspire to improve the presence of the involved languages in the digital humanities.

Work performed

HUNAYNNET is a doubly interdisciplinary undertaking, i.e. both within the humanities and in the crossing between the humanities and the digital world, an approach which we definitely see as the optimal way to shed light upon our subject matter. This interdisciplinary approach has required of our part to proceed systematically and in very well-defined steps toward the completion of our task. This first part of our project has been devoted towards the preparatory material that will constitute the basis of our online portal. This encompasses the preparation of the textual basis of our work. For this end, we have prepared annotated transcriptions of the Syriac and Arabic works which we aim to include in our corpus.

Having conducted a thorough survey of existing projects, we soon realized that our project is somewhat unique in one crucial respect: it aims to provide aligned editions of a single text in various languages, whereas the vast majority of similar projects focus on delivering the optimum user experience for a single text or a collection of texts in one language. We thus ended up with a situation where two use-cases need to be considered: firstly, we want to accommodate those members of our target audience who are interested in the texts themselves and need the functionality to address different philological issues and, secondly, we are fully aware that some users are more linguistically attuned and would like to conduct a linguistic analysis. As a result, a two-pronged approach was developed: we decided to provide two platforms for data visualization in order to satisfy the requirements of both groups of potential users as best as possible, rather than to offer one single solution that satisfies both, but neither particularly well. At the same time, however, both solutions are to be integrated as closely and as seamlessly as possible by taking advantage of all capabilities of selected technical implementation. The two solutions are: Reading Interface and Parallel Corpus.

The primary purpose of the Reading Interface is to provide the user with a way to simply read the texts, whether in parallel or separately, in a way that is most suitable for digital consultation, while also preserving all the relevant scholarly information and providing access to tools which aid them in their research. The purpose of the Parallel Corpus is to provide an interface to conduct standard corpus research involving, for example, collocation extraction, lexicographic analysis, n-gram analysis and parallel lexical analysis.

The project is planning to include in the corpus those scientific and philosophical texts that are available in all three versions, Greek, Syriac and Arabic. Hence, the corpus will comprise eleven works that are represented by some 30 versions. The following texts are already prepared and available for consultation at the project website: Aristotle\'s Categories (Greek, three Syriac and one Arabic version), Aristotle\'s On Interpretation (Greek, two Syriac and two Arabic versions), Porphyry\'s Isagoge (Greek, two Syriac and one Arabic version).

The Parallel Corpus includes the same texts that are available in the Reading Interface. The texts are imported into an open-source corpus management system, NoSketchEngine (NoSkE), an open-source corpus management tool designed especially for the linguistic study of text corpora. The texts are being enriched with the standard set of linguistic annotation: tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis.

Final results

One of the greatest achievements of the project is going to be a preparation of the first editions for a number of Syriac and Arabic versions that haven\'t been edited so far. Furthermore, already edited texts are going to be improved based on collation of the manuscripts and uniform editorial guidelines.

By the end of the project, we plan to prepare an aligned corpus of Greek texts and their Syriac and Arabic versions – this is going to be the first of its kind corpus of historical texts. The works of the following authors are going to be included: Porphyry, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates and some other. The aligned texts will be available for simple reading and comparison in the Reading Interface and at the same time will be available for more sophisticated linguistic analysis in the Parallel Corpus.

The entire corpus will be freely available and will provide the texts in different formats for further reuse and research (TEI compliant XML files, HTML files and PDF files).

By means of scientific networking we aspire to contribute to the development of the computational approach for the Syriac texts. Particularly, we are going to enlarge the body of the Syriac and Arabic texts available in digital form and to enhance the tools for lemmatization and morphological analysis. All in all, HUNAYNNET will contribute to a better visibility of the Syriac tradition and, more particularly, will enable to study the role of the Syriac translations as intermediaries between the Greek and the Arabic.

Website & more info

More info: https://hunaynnet.oeaw.ac.at/.