Work Programme Comparative Philology

In Research Area 2, the Comparative Philology team analyses the language of magical texts, starting with individual lexical units and their respective word fields, followed by larger linguistic units such as noun and verb phrases, sentences, and finally textual units attested in the corpora studied. Thus, most areas of linguistic analysis are relevant to research in MagEIA,  from phonetics and phonology (e.g., for the voces magicae) to morphosyntax, syntax, semantics, and text linguistics.

In cooperation with the PIs and staff of Comparative Philology, Egyptology, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, a lexicon of the emic terminology of magic is being developed under the auspices of Comparative Philology, initially in Greek, and in the second funding phase prospectively of Egyptian and Akkadian and Sumerian. The postdoctoral researcher is researching the grammar of Greek magical texts. Here, the focus is on the question of text type-specific features of the "technical language of magic".

In Research Area 3, the team of Comparative Philology will develop an annotation scheme for magical texts based on XML/TEI, which will serve as a basis for the annotation of the respective texts studied in MagEIA for all staff and fellows.