[PLing] Vortrag von Hannes Fellner zum Thema "Digital Advances on the Ancient Silk Road"

[Tristan Miller]

Liebe Kolleg*innen,

ich möchte Sie sehr herzlich zum Vortrag von Hannes Fellner von der 
Univeristät Wien einladen. Sein Vortrag mit dem Titel "Digital Advances 
on the Ancient Silk Road" ist Teil der aktuellen Vortragsreihe des 
Österreichischen Forschungsinstituts für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) 
und wird am Mittwoch, den 10.5.2023 um 18:30 (UTC+2) am OFAI (Freyung 
6/6/7, 1010 Wien) und auch online stattfinden.

Zoom Zugang:
URL: 
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Abstract und Biographie finden Sie unten angehängt.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihre Teilnahme!

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Tristan Miller

Talk abstract: From the 2nd century CE on, communities and monasteries 
developed along the trade routes of the ancient Silk Road in and around 
the Tarim Basin in today’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the 
People’s Republic of China. These were centres of writing, copying, 
translating, and transmitting texts similar to the monasteries in 
medieval Europe. The old Indo-European languages Sanskrit, Tocharian, 
and Saka written in a Central Asian variant of the Indian Brahmi script 
– Tarim Brahmi – were the major languages in use in the Tarim Basin in 
the first millennium CE. In contrast to the writing traditions in 
medieval Europe, the ones on this part of the Silk Road are not well 
understood, mainly due to the fragmentary status of texts. I this talk, 
I will address recent efforts of making these languages and the Tarim 
Brahmi script digitally accessible and operable for philological, 
palaeographic, and linguistic research in the framework of the FWF-START 
project “The characters that shaped the Silk Road – A database and 
digital palaeography of Tarim Brahmi”. In the project, the text 
witnesses are linked to their digital facsimiles on the character level 
using Transkribus. All data concerning the texts is combined in an XML 
database and published through a web application. This allows to 
determine which text was written by whom, when, where, and how in order to

* trace the evolution of Tarim Brahmi and its adaptation to the 
different languages

* reveal the relationship between script types, languages, and genres

* categorize countless text fragments that are so far unidentified 
(regarding language, provenance, date, genre etc.)

* potentially (re)combine scattered fragments belonging to the same 
manuscript leaf

* and, of course, to better understand literacy and writing culture in 
the Tarim Basin

Speaker biography: Hannes A. Fellner studied linguistics at the 
University of Vienna and received his PhD from Harvard University in 
2013. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and 
assistant professor at Leiden University. Since 2018 he is the principal 
investigator of a START-project funded by Austrian Science Fund 
dedicated to the research of the Central Asian variants of the Indian 
Brahmi script. He is currently associate professor for historical 
linguistics and digital philology at the University of Vienna. He is a 
member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the 
director of the Austrian Institute for Research on China and Southeast 
Asia. His research interests include Indo-European nominal morphology, 
historical and comparative linguistics and philology of the 
Indo-European languages of the ancient Silk Road, and theoretical 
approaches to language change.

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Tristan Miller, Research Scientist
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, 1010 Vienna, Austria | Tel: +43 1 5336112 12
https://logological.org/ | https://punderstanding.ofai.at/