AELAW - Ancient European languages and writings
Principal Investigator at ZRC SAZU
Marjeta Šašel Kos, PhD-
Original Title
AELAW - Ancient European languages and writings
Project Team
Anja Ragolič, PhD, Marjeta Šašel Kos, PhD-
Duration
14 April 2015–12 April 2019 -
Project Leader
AELAW has been developed with the aim of co-ordinating a wide group of international researchers dedicated to the study of the different ancient European languages and writings. The objective of the project is to create an ample work team capable of establishing the foundations for the creation, for the first time, of a large online databank which permits the cataloguing of all the currently known documents in this type of languages, thus introducing this important part of the European cultural heritage into the 21st century.
There is written evidence of about twenty fragmentary ancient European languages. Of these some 20,000 documents are conserved on stone, metal or pottery in diverse systems of writing, some of which have not been completely deciphered yet.
Research into them requires specialists in historical and philological-linguistic matters and these suffer from a pronounced geographical dispersion according to their geographical field of study (Gaul, Hispania, Italy, the North of Africa) or to their corresponding linguistic family (Latin, Celtic, Italic, other minor Indo-European branches, Basque ...).
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