Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PapyGreek (Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri)

Teaser

The project creates a new Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri. It fills a void in Greek scholarship: the papyrological corpus represents the Post-Classical variety of Greek, a bridge between Classical and Medieval Greek, which has hitherto been very difficult to use as...

Summary

The project creates a new Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri. It fills a void in Greek scholarship: the papyrological corpus represents the Post-Classical variety of Greek, a bridge between Classical and Medieval Greek, which has hitherto been very difficult to use as a source for studying historical linguistics. This project will develop new digital methods for studying this fragmentary but vast text corpus.

Greek is a unique language for linguists in its chronological scope. Documentary Greek papyri, ranging from ca. 300 BCE to 700 CE, can be contrasted with literature: these papyri preserve us the language as the ancient writer composed it and lead us close to the colloquial contemporary language. The nonstandard variation in documentary texts is where language change can first be detected, making the papyrological corpus an important source for diachronic study of Greek. The new Grammar of Greek papyri will answer such questions as how much bilingualism affected Greek in Egypt and when and where it was a dominant feature of the society. The papyri will partly be treated as big data; morpological analyse will be applied to the whole corpus. This will enable e.g. phonological analyses to be performed in greater accuracy than has been possible before through eliminating the confusion between inflectional morphology and phonological variation. Greek language has a rich morphology, and several historical changes in the language affected the inflection. The phonological developments (both language internal and language external, i.e. contact-induced) were possible causes for the morphological merging of case-endings and verbal inflection. This, in part, led to confusion of certain syntactic structures.

As a result, the Digital Grammar will bring the language used in the Greek papyri openly available to the scholarly community in an unforeseen manner. It will include new, more exact analyses of the phonology and morphology of Greek in Egypt, as well as a possibility to search both phonological and morphological forms, in combination or in separation, in the whole corpus. The syntactically annotated corpora will form a smaller but constantly expanding corpus of selected papyri, which yields to a wider range of searches on morphosyntax.

Work performed

The PI began working on March 2018 with planning the calls for employees and project’s agenda. A call for research assistants and a PhD student was opened. The first research assistant Petri Lahtinen began in May 2018; his task was mainly treebanking (=performing morphosyntactic annotation) papyrus texts. The PI was in charge of teaching and supervising this. The PI presented the project in several invited lectures (e.g. a keynote in the Annual Conference of Linguistics in Finland, 2018) as well as preliminary results in the International Congress of Papyrology in August 2019 in Lecce.

The Opening Colloquium of the project was held in June 7-8, 2018 in Helsinki. The PI and future members of the project (Dahlgren and Henriksson) presented their planned work and the invited international experts presented their current research related to the project’s theme and methods. The colloquium was successful, as knowledge of the project was disseminated internationally and we could open up discussions for future collaborations.

The first postdoctoral researcher, Sonja Dahlgren, began her work in July 2018. Her task at the first phase is to decide which phonological features are the most fruitful ones for our queries combined with the morphological data. She presented a part of her work in a workshop of Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in SLE congress in New York in January 2019 and in the International Congress of Papyrology (Lecce) in July 2019. She also made research visits to Lyon and Edinburgh to establish collaboration connections and familiarize with equipment used for phonological measuring; this will help her to prove coarticulation phenomena.

The PhD student, Polina Yordanova, was hired in September 2018. During the reporting period, she has charted the field of possible topics that combine treebanking and syntactic research and as a result, her dissertation topic is “Word order in Greek documentary papyri from the late Ptolemaic to the early Roman period ( IIIc BCE - III c CE) - patterns of non-projectivity”. She has also selected suitable papyrus archives for this study and has begun annotating them as well as learning different methods for performing suitable queries for the corpus. She has also contributed in writing our guidelines for annotation as well as teaching, reviewing and correcting the annotations of the student assistants.

The second planned postdoctoral scholar, Erik Henriksson, was hired from January 2019 onwards (as a PhD student at this phase). He has been developing the infrastructure of the project’s online portal PapyGreek (https://papygreek.hum.helsinki.fi/). We have had fruitful collaboration with a doctoral candidate Alek Keersmaekers (KU Leuven), whose already existing morphological annotations of the papyrological corpus Henriksson has been implementing to our portal. Some samples of Keersmaekers’ automatic syntactic experiments have also been given to us for testing and for manual correction within PapyGreek project. The results of this still remain open.

The project organized a workshop for training in EpiDoc XML language and Treebanking in April 2019. Two scholars from London (Gabriel Bodard and Simona Stoyanova) were invited to teach Epidoc, and Vierros and Yordanova from the PapyGreek project taught treebanking. The call to attend was international and attendees came from several countries. Combining EpiDoc and Treebanking into one workshop was done for the first time, and it proved to be successful.

The project has organized a monthly research seminar, Helsinki Research of the Ancient World (HelRAW), during the fall 2018 and spring 2019, together with another ERC project (771874), “Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition (SpaceLaw)”. The seminar presenters have been invited international guests as well as researchers and PhD students from the University of Helsinki. The underlying idea has been to gather together experts

Final results

The project creates a digital grammar of Greek documentary papyri. We can gain significantly more precise information on the developments of the Greek language by studying the linguistic variation which is available in the papyrological material when we adjust the existing digital corpus of documentary papyri so that it yields to computational linguistic methods.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/digital-grammar-of-greek-documentary-papyri.