About Thesaurus Linguae Aethiopicae

Named (provisionally) Thesaurus Linguae Aethiopicae , the project aims at creating machine-readable and SGML-encoded (according to the guidelines of TEI P 3) Ethiopic texts and collecting them in a corpus for further research.
Encoding should take into account the needs of philology, history and linguistics.The working group, which is based on an initiative started in 1991, is already investigating a number of texts.
The choice of texts has been pragmatically according to the specific demands of current research. Thus, within the framework of research on typological change in Ethio-Semitics the following texts are under preparation:<

• the Axumite inscriptions
• new editions of Imperial songs in old Amharic
• the chronicle of Zär'a-Ya'qob
• the Ser'atä mängest and related texts
• the Haymanotä abaw (a history of the Ethiopian Church, in amharic)

In the present stage document headers and writing system declarations (DTD, WSD etc.) to serve as models are in preparation.
Interested colleagues are invited to a ask for further information and to contribute texts. These could be in any format at present since the Mainz working group has ample experience and a number of instruments for conversion at its disposal.
It should be said that transliteration, encoding and further elaboration of texts is intended to be totally independent of hard- or software configurations.
Information on stored Ethiopic texts, accessability and on-going work would be most welcome in order to come to a kind of coordination and cooperation.
This homepage wich will continuously give information on new developments, lists of available texts, projects, etc. is divided in four sections.

 In the section "Information" you will find general information, important adresses and a description of our mailing list ethio-mail which is designed as an open forum for exchange of information and questions about Ethiopian languages, literature, history and related topics, computer application in Ethiopian projects, project announcements, meetings, news, working tools etc.
On our ethio-links page we havce a collection of interessting and relevant links concerning Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa text-corpora projects and Ethiopic on computer.

 In the section "Documentation" you will find information about the project. At the moment our main focus lies in the development of the encoding and the markup of Ethiopic texts.

 In the section Texts we will present selected texts. It will be expanded continously with additional texts.

 In the section "Ethiopian Studies in Mainz" you will find announcements of actual conferences as well as information and reports from the Ethiopian Studies at Johannes Gutenberg - University in Mainz.