Ancient text corpora

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An exhibit of part of the Library of Ashurbanipal, one of the largest components of the Akkadian corpus Library of Ashurbanipal.jpg
An exhibit of part of the Library of Ashurbanipal, one of the largest components of the Akkadian corpus

Ancient text corpora are the entire collection of texts from the period of ancient history, defined in this article as the period from the beginning of writing up to 300 AD. These corpora are important for the study of literature, history, linguistics, and other fields, and are a fundamental component of the world's cultural heritage.

Contents

Chinese, Latin, and Greek are examples of ancient languages with significant text corpora, although much of these corpora are known to us via transmission (frequently via medieval manuscript copies) rather than in their original form. These texts – both transmitted and original – provide valuable insights into the history and culture of different regions of the world, and have been studied for centuries by scholars and researchers. Other ancient texts – particularly stone inscriptions and papyrus scrolls – have been published following archaeological research, notably the cuneiform corpus of c.10 million words and the c.5 million words in ancient Egyptian.

Through advances in technology and digitization, ancient text corpora are more accessible than ever before. Tools such as the Perseus Digital Library and the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit [1] have made it easier for researchers to access and analyze these texts.

Quantifying the corpora

Two types of ancient texts are known to modern scholars – those that have only survived in younger manuscripts, but whose great age is undisputed (this applies to the bulk of the Chinese, Brahmi, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Avestan tradition), and those known from original inscriptions, papyri and other manuscripts. [2]

Counting of the words in each corpus presents significant methodological challenges – in principle, every single occurrence of a word in the text is counted separately, but in the case of parallel transmission of literary texts, only a single transmission is taken into account. Just as the Book of the Dead and the coffin texts are only included once in the number given for the Egyptian, the Greek and Latin literary works should only be counted according to one manuscript. If, on the other hand, tombs, royal inscriptions or economic documents of certain ancient languages often show a more or less identical form, this is not evaluated as a purely "parallel tradition". Attached prepositions are counted as separate words, except in the case of the definite article in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek since it has no equivalent in most languages, so its frequency would significantly affect the comparability of numbers. [2]

Languages with known size estimates

ScriptLanguageDates usedNumber of texts prior to 300ADNumber of words prior to 300ADRef.
ArchaeologicalTransmissionTotal
Egyptian hieroglyphs / Hieratic Egyptian 5,000,000none5,000,000 [3] [4]
Demotic 1,000,000none1,000,000 [5]
Greek (Ancient Greek literature, New Testament, Church Fathers, etc.)57,000,000 [6] [7]
Latin 10,000,000 [8] [7]
Cuneiform Akkadian 144,000 [9] 9,900,000 [9] none9,900,000 [10]
Sumerian 102,300 [11] 3,076,000 [11] none3,076,000 [12]
Hurrian 12,500none12,500 [13]
Urartian 40010,000none10,000
Hittite 700,000none700,000 [14]
Hattic 500none500 [15]
Cuneiform Luwian3000none3000 [16]
Elamite 2,087100,000none100,000 [17]
Protoelamic 1,43520,000none20,000 [18]
Eblaite 16,000300,000none300,000 [19]
Amorite 7,00011,600none11,600 [20]
Ugaritic 40,000none40,000 [21]
Old Persian 7,000100,000107,000 [22]
Canaanite and Aramaic Ancient Hebrew (inc. Hebrew Bible)35,000265,000300,000 [23] [24]
Aramaic (ancient, imperial, biblical, Hasmonean, Nabataean, Palmyrenean)100,000 [25]
Phoenician/Punic10,00068 [26] [27] [28] [29]
Old South Arabian 10,500112,500none112,500 [30] [31]
Etruscan 25,00025,000 [32] [33]

South Asian

Mesoamerican

East Asian

Central Iranian languages

Proto-Sinaitic

Anatolian

Old Italic

Iberia

Germanic Northern Europe

Africa

Aegean

Micro corpora

There are a significant number of ancient micro-corpus languages. Estimating the total number of attested ancient languages may be as difficult as estimating their corpus size. For example, Greek and Latin sources hand down an enormous amount of foreign-language glosses, the seriousness of which is not always certain. [59]

Preservation and curation

Historic preservation and maintaining ancient text corpora presents several challenges, including issues with preservation, translation, and digitization. Many ancient texts have been lost over time, and those that survive may be damaged or fragmented. Translating ancient languages and scripts requires specialized expertise, and digitizing texts can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Corpus linguistics

The field of corpus linguistics studies language as expressed in text corpora. This includes the analysis of word frequency, collocations, grammar, and semantics. Ancient text corpora provide a valuable resource for corpus linguistics research, enabling scholars to explore the evolution of language and culture over time.

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anatolian languages</span> Extinct branch of Indo-European languages

The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lycian language</span> Extinct Indo-European language of southwestern Anatolia

The Lycian language was the language of the ancient Lycians who occupied the Anatolian region known during the Iron Age as Lycia. Most texts date back to the fifth and fourth century BC. Two languages are known as Lycian: regular Lycian or Lycian A, and Lycian B or Milyan. Lycian became extinct around the beginning of the first century BC, replaced by the Ancient Greek language during the Hellenization of Anatolia. Lycian had its own alphabet, which was closely related to the Greek alphabet but included at least one character borrowed from Carian as well as characters proper to the language. The words were often separated by two points.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luwian language</span> Ancient Indo-European language of the Hittite Empire

Luwian, sometimes known as Luvian or Luish, is an ancient language, or group of languages, within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from Luwiya – the name of the region in which the Luwians lived. Luwiya is attested, for example, in the Hittite laws.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bedřich Hrozný</span> Czech archeologist, linguist and orientalist (1879–1952)

Bedřich Hrozný, also known as Friedrich Hrozny, was a Czech orientalist and linguist. He contributed to the decipherment of the ancient Hittite language, identified it as an Indo-European language, and laid the groundwork for the development of Hittitology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cuneiform</span> Writing system of the ancient Near East

Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hittite language</span> Extinct Bronze Age Indo-European language

Hittite, also known as Nesite, is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The language, now long extinct, is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hattusa</span> Capital of the Hittite Empire

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Assyriology</span> Archaeological sub-discipline

Assyriology, also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC, to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD, so the topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Palmyrene Aramaic</span> Western Aramaic dialect spoken in the city of Palmyra in the early centuries AD

Palmyrene Aramaic was a primarily Western Aramaic dialect, exhibiting Eastern Aramaic grammatical features and hence often regarded as a dialect continuum between the Eastern and Western Aramaic branches. It was primarily documented in Palmyra itself, but also found in the western parts of the Roman Empire, extending as far as Britannia. Dated inscriptions range from 44 BCE to 274 CE, with over 4,000 known inscriptions, mostly comprising honorific, dedicatory, and funerary texts. The dialect still retains echoes of earlier Imperial Aramaic. The lexicon bears influences from both Koine Greek and, to some extent, Arabic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tyana</span> Ancient city

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The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anatolian hieroglyphs</span> Writing system

Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous logographic script native to central Anatolia, consisting of some 500 signs. They were once commonly known as Hittite hieroglyphs, but the language they encode proved to be Luwian, not Hittite, and the term Luwian hieroglyphs is used in English publications. They are typologically similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, but do not derive graphically from that script, and they are not known to have played the sacred role of hieroglyphs in Egypt. There is no demonstrable connection to Hittite cuneiform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Old Persian cuneiform</span> Semi-alphabetic cuneiform script

Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for Old Persian. Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran, Armenia, Romania (Gherla), Turkey, and along the Suez Canal. They were mostly inscriptions from the time period of Darius I, such as the DNa inscription, as well as his son, Xerxes I. Later kings down to Artaxerxes III used more recent forms of the language classified as "pre-Middle Persian".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multilingual inscription</span> Inscription that includes the same text in two or more languages

In epigraphy, a multilingual inscription is an inscription that includes the same text in two or more languages. A bilingual is an inscription that includes the same text in two languages. Multilingual inscriptions are important for the decipherment of ancient writing systems, and for the study of ancient languages with small or repetitive corpora.

Cybistra or Kybistra, earlier known as Ḫubišna, was a town of ancient Cappadocia or Cilicia.

The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, or Oracc, is an ongoing project designed to make the corpus of cuneiform compositions from the ancient Near East available online and accessible to users. The project, created by Steve Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania, incorporates a number of sub-projects, including online publications of lemmatized texts in different genres, as well as extensive annotations and other tools for studying and learning about the ancient Near East. The sub-projects are directed by individual scholars specializing in the relevant topic. The overall project is led by a steering committee of Tinney, Eleanor Robson of Cambridge University, and Niek Veldhuis of the University of California, Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions</span> Inscriptions in the ancient Canaanite and Aramaic languages

The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, are the primary extra-Biblical source for understanding of the society and history of the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arameans. Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. The older inscriptions form a Canaanite–Aramaic dialect continuum, exemplified by writings which scholars have struggled to fit into either category, such as the Stele of Zakkur and the Deir Alla Inscription.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kubaba (goddess)</span> Hurro-Hittite goddess

Kubaba was a goddess of uncertain origin worshiped in ancient Syria. Despite the similarity of her name to these of legendary queen Kubaba of Kish and Phrygian Cybele, she is considered a distinct figure from them both. Her character is poorly known. Multiple local traditions associating her with other deities existed, and they cannot necessarily be harmonized with each other. She is first documented in texts from Kanesh and Alalakh, though her main cult center was Carchemish. She was among the deities worshiped in northern Syria who were incorporated into Hurrian religion, and in Hurrian context she occurs in some of the Ugaritic texts. She was also incorporated into Hittite religion through Hurrian intermediaties. In the first millennium BCE she was worshiped by Luwians, Arameans and Lydians, and references to her can be found in a number of Greek texts.

References

  1. ↑ "Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS) - Online Sanskrit dictionary and annotated corpus". www.sanskrit-linguistics.org. Archived from the original on 2023-06-03. Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  2. 1 2 Peust 2000, pp. 252–253.
  3. ↑ Carsten Peust, "Über ägyptische Lexikographie. 1: Zum Ptolemaic Lexikon von Penelope Wilson; 2: Versuch eines quantitativen Vergleichs der Textkorpora antiker Sprachen Archived 2023-04-16 at the Wayback Machine ", in Lingua Aegyptia 7, 2000: 245-260: "Nach einer von W. F. Reineke in S. Grunert & L Hafemann (Hrsgg.), Textcorpus und Wörterbuch (Problemeder Ägyptologie 14), Leiden 1999, S.xiii veröffentlichten Schätzung W. Schenkels beträgt die Zahl der in allen heute bekannten ägyptischen (d.h. hieroglyphischen und hieratischen) Texten enthaltenen Wortformen annähernd 5 Millio nen und tendiert, wenn man die Fälle von Mehrfachüberlieferung u.a. des Toten buchs und der Sargtexte separat zählt, gegen 10 Millionen; das Berliner Zettelarchiv des Wörterbuchs der ägyptischen Sprache von A. Erman & H. Grapow (Wb), das sei nerzeit Vollständigkeit anstrebte, umfasst "nur" 1,7 Millionen (nach anderen Angaben: 1,5 Millionen) Zettel." (p.246)
  4. ↑ W. Schenkel (1995). "Die Lexikographie des Altägyptisch-Koptischen". The lexicography of the Ancient Near Eastern languages (PDF). Verona: Essedue. p. 197. ISBN   88-85697-43-7. OCLC   34816015. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-04-30. Retrieved 2023-05-05.
  5. ↑ The Chicago Demotic Dictionary, in which the Demotic texts were published between 1955 and 1979, with the exception of the definite and indefinite articles and the suffix pronouns (J.H. Johnson in S. Grunert & L Hafemann, Textcorpus und Handbuch , Leiden 1999, p. 243), has produced more than 200,000 slips (R.K. Ritner in S.P. Vleeming, Aspects of Demotic Lexicography, Leuven 1987, p. 145). Peust states that this represents only a fraction of the total number of known demotic texts, which could be in the region of a million words.
  6. ↑ The vocabulary of Greek is completely recorded in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, which was previously published on CDRom by the University of California, Irvine. The currently available version E, in which all texts up to 600 AD and a selection of Byzantine texts from the following epoch are included in their entirety, comes to a total of around 76 million text words. In 1985, when the authors up to 400 AD were mostly scattered (2700 authors), but only 200 authors from the period after 400, the database still contained 57 million words (L. Berkowitz & KA Squitier, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Canon of Greek Authors and Works, New York 1986, p. xii f.). Even if the vocabulary of the texts up to AD 300 must still be somewhat smaller and we also want to deduct the numerous examples of the Greek definite article, we can still clearly declare Greek to be the best preserved ancient language within the framework of our specifications. This corpus also contains writings by the Church Fathers written in Greek.
  7. 1 2 Dee, James H. (2002). "The First Downloadable Word-Frequency Database for Classical and Medieval Latin". The Classical Journal. 98 (1). The Classical Association of the Middle West and South: 59–67. ISSN   0009-8353. JSTOR   3298278. Archived from the original on 2023-05-05. Retrieved 2023-05-05. All those frequency counts are drawn from a much wider variety of subjects and styles than exist for classical or medieval Latin, and because the volume of printed and spoken matter in any modern language is staggeringly huge, their authors take great pains to select "representative" corpora, seeking statistically meaningful data. Things are quite different in Latin, where there is, for the classical period, a surviving mass of literature estimated at no more than 9,000,000 words, whereas the corpus of classical Greek literature is usually estimated at "only" ten times that much.'
  8. ↑ Peust states that the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae has 9 to 10 million words. Thesaurus Linguae Latinae has all texts up to AD 150 complete and the later texts up to AD 600 selectively (W. Ehlers, Der Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, in Antiquity and Occident 14, 1968, 172ff.) with nine (according to other sources: ten) million slips. Even if the vocabulary of Latin up to the year 300 AD has not yet been precisely determined, it should be clear that it surpasses that of Egyptian but is below that of Greek. However, the rule of thumb often heard among classical philologists, that there are ten times as many Greek as Latin texts, is exaggerated, at least if one takes our time limit of 300 AD as a basis.
  9. 1 2 Streck 2010, p. 54.
  10. ↑ Peust estimated > 10,000,000, stating that estimating the disparately published corpus of this language is extremely difficult. As with the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and the Egyptian Dictionary, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (“Assyrian” means Akkadian as a whole, not just its Assyrian dialect) began with a systematic fragmentation of text. When, in 1948, 1,249,000 slips had been reached, the systematic fiddling was stopped and the index was only expanded to include selected slips, so that by 1964 around 1500,000 to 1750,000 entries had come together (I.J. Gelb in CAD Vol. A 7, Chicago 1964, p. xvi). In my estimation, however, this should only be a fraction of the entire Akkadian material. The Assyriologist S.N. Kramer is said to have estimated that there were 500,000 cuneiform tablets (most of the cuneiform texts are in Akkadian). Also of interest is the estimate by A.L. Oppenheims, Ancient Mesopotamia, Chicago 21977, p. 17f., that the private library Assur banipals found in Nineveh contained 1200 to 1500 tablets, the number of lines of which "would probably reach, if not exceed in bulk, even the size of the M ahabharata with its 190,000 verses". Far less than half of this library has survived and been published, but on the other hand there are of course many more texts than those in Ashurbanipal's library. Instead of a specific number, I'd like to conclude by conjecturing that the corpus of Akkadian may be of the order of Latin.
  11. 1 2 Streck 2010, p. 53.
  12. ↑ Sumerian corpus is difficult to estimate. According to W. Sallaberger & A. Westenholz, Mesopotamia: Akkade period and Ur III period, approximations 3, Freiburg/Schw. 1999 (OBO 160/3), p. 128, just under 40,000 administrative and legal documents from the Ur III period that have been published to date, each of which may contain an average of 20 to 30 words, which amounts to a million word forms. However, the total volume will probably remain below that of the Egyptian texts.
  13. ↑ "The most heavily attested of these languages is Hurrian, which is not related to Hittite. The previously published volumes (1,2, 4, 5, 7, 9) of the corpus of Hurrian language monuments published by V. Haas contain a good 10,000 Hurrian words; MitannikönigsTusrattaanAmenophisITI(ed.J.Friedrich , Asiatic language monuments, Berlin 1932, p. 8 ff.) with approx i s c h e (ed. G.A. Melikisvili, Urartskije klinoobraznyje nadpisi, Moskva 1960, about 10 000 words), which can be considered as a successor language of Hurrian.
  14. ↑ "1980 600,000 words = 90% of the text material wasted at the chD. Among the cuneiform languages, Hittite, known for the most part through texts from Boghazkoi, the old capital of the Hittite Empire, comes in third place attested. The index boxes of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary contained over 600,000 index cards in 1980, when they had completely bogged down "over 90 percent" of the texts published up to that point (H.G. Güterbock & H.A. Hoffner, The Hittite Dictionary, Vol. 3/1 [L ], Chicago 1980, p. xv). In the text material from Boghazkoi, several regional languages from the Hittite sphere of influence are also attested, mostly in the form of Hittite foreign languages Bilinguals of religious content or in the form of foreign-language passages interspersed in Hittite ritual texts.
  15. ↑ "Another Boghazkoi language that has so far hardly been understood is Hattian . The total mass of the known Hattic text material should not exceed a few thousand words (the texts edited in J. Klinger, Studien zur Reconstruction of the Hattic Cult Layer, Wiesbaden 1996 contain about 500 words); the number will be easier to determine as soon as the announced compilation of texts in the Hattic language by H. Otten & Ch. Rüster (StBo 37) has been published.
  16. ↑ There are a few hundred "glossal wedge words" interspersed in Hittite texts, see Güterbock, H. G. (1956). "Notes on Luwian Studies (A propos B. Rosenkranz' Book". Orientalia. 25 (2). GBPress- Gregorian Biblical Press: 120ff. ISSN   0030-5367. JSTOR   43581480. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  17. ↑ 2,087 Persepolis tablets + royal inscriptions etc. This is the number divided by Richard Hallock in his publication Persepolis Fortification Tablets. Numerous other panels are still unpublished. See Matthew Stolper Archived 2007-02-14 at the Wayback Machine : "there were as many as 15,000 to 30,000 or more tablets and fragments. Most (thousands of tablets and tens of thousands of fragments) were in the elamite language in cuneiform script." This is a little-known but comparatively well-attested cuneiform language Elamite used in Persia. A count of the most important publications gives the following: R.T. Hailock, Persepolis Fortification Tablets, Chicago 1969, 2087 clay tablets with about 50,000 words (besides that, many tablets have remained unpublished); F.W. King, The [sc. pre-Achaemenidic] Elamite royal inscriptions, Graz 1965, approx. 10000 words; F.H. Weissbach, Die Keilinschriften der Achaemeniden, Leipzig 1911, approx. 5000 words; GC Cameron, Persepolis Treasury Tablets, Chicago 1948, about 5000 words. With all the Elamite material published so far, one will get close to 100,000 words.
  18. ↑ "c after Englund 1998, 22 note. 8: 1,450 published texts from susa and 146 unpublished texts. This does not include the 1435 known written in the Proto-Elamic script, which was only partially deciphered Benen panels from the third millennium (ed.P.Meriggi, Lascrituraproto-elamica, 3 vols., Roma 1971/4), which contain around 20,000 characters, most of which can be read logographically.
  19. ↑ 2,436 complete panels, 13947 fragments of different sizes. After I. Samir, see appendix 1 below to the national Museum of Syria, Idlib for a breakdown of the fragments by size. Peust assumed 1,800 tablets and 15,000 fragments. The oldest known Semitic language is Eblaitic from the third millennium, discovered only in the 1970s, of which 1800 intact, often quite extensive clay tablets were found along with around 15,000 fragments (G.Pettinato, Catalogo dei testi cuneiformi di Tell Mardikh-Ebla, Napoli 1979, p. xvi f. (ASIN   B004HZDL5K)). The 3,000 or so pieces published to date (G. Conti, Index of Eblaitic texts published or cited, Firenze 1992) should contain around 300,000 words.
  20. ↑ 7,000 personal names + 90 safe loan words, according to Streck, M.P. (2000). Das amurritische Onomastikon der altbabylonischen Zeit. Alter Orient und Altes Testament (in German). Ugarit-Verlag. p. 135. ISBN   978-3-927120-87-7. Archived from the original on 2023-05-14. Retrieved 2023-05-14.
  21. ↑ "The Ugaritic cuneiform alphabetic texts collected in M. Dietrich et al, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts, Munster 21995 comprise about 40000 words. There is also an insignificant number of Ugaritic glosses in syllabic cuneiform.
  22. ↑ The Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions (ed. R.G.Kent, Old Persian, New Haven 1953) contain about 7000 words; the linguistically closely related Avesta texts (ed. K.F. Geldner, Avesta, 3 vols., Stuttgart 1896), which have survived only in recent manuscripts, contain around 100,000 words
  23. ↑ Peust follows the estimates of Clines (see following reference) that the total number of Ancient Hebrew words are 353,396, from a summation of the Hebrew Bible's 305,500 words, plus 38,349 words from the Dead Sea Scrolls, 7,020 words from the apocryphal Book of Sirach and 2,528 words from the inscriptions. Peust then subtracts the 34,622 instances for the definite article ה־ha-, and notes that one can also argue about the 62,760 cases of ו "and" that is grammaticalized in a special way in Hebrew, concluding that adjusting for these figures, the corpus of Ancient Hebrew is of the order of 300,000 words.
  24. ↑ Clines, D.J.A. (1993). The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew: Aleph. Sheffield Academic Press. p. 28. ISBN   978-1-905048-75-5. Archived from the original on 2023-05-14. Retrieved 2023-05-14. [Table: Biblical: BHS 305500; Non-biblica: Ben Sire 7020, Qumran 38349, Inscr 2528; Total 353396] The foregoing statistics of the size of the various corpora of Hebrew texts have been derived in the following way. From the totals in the table, Words Beginning with Aleph in Order of Frequency, it can be seen that we have identified 61,883 occurrences of words in the Hebrew Bible (Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia) beginning with Aleph. Knowing that there are some 305,500 words in the Hebrew Bible (the figure comes from Francis I. Andersen and A. Dean Forbes, The Vocabulary of the Old Testament [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989], p. 23), we can assume that, roughly speaking, the 1,422 occurrences of Aleph words in ben Sira imply a text of c. 7,020 words (i.e. 1422, divided by 61833 and multiplied by 305500). Similarly, the total of 7,768 occurrences in the Qumran and related materials implies a corpus of c. 38,300 words (in the non-biblical texts already published, that is).
  25. ↑ Peust writes that the corpus of Aramaic is fragmented into numerous dialects: Peust concludes that the total Aramaic corpus available up to this time is probably not much less than 100,000 words, and notes that from about 300 AD the Aramaic text corpus increases in leaps and bounds, since several major literary languages are now developing (Syriac, Mandean, Galilean, Samaritan).
  26. ↑ Gray, Louis H. (1923). "The Punic Passages in the "Poenulus" of Plautus". The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. 39 (2). University of Chicago Press: 73–88. doi:10.1086/369974. ISSN   1062-0516. JSTOR   528483. S2CID   170454820. Archived from the original on 2023-05-05. Retrieved 2023-05-05.
  27. ↑ Peust states that the corpus of Phoenician including Punic per Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften (KAI) amounts to around 10,000 words, but this contradicts other estimates of 10,000 texts in the whole corpus. KAI contains a selection of texts rather than a complete corpus.
  28. ↑ Doak, Brian R. (2019-08-26). The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean. Oxford University Press. p. 223. ISBN   978-0-19-049934-1. Most estimates place it at around ten thousand texts. Texts that are either formulaic or extremely short constitute the vast majority of the evidence.
  29. ↑ Lehmann, Reinhard G. (2013). "Wilhelm Gesenius and the Rise of Phoenician Philology". Biblische Exegese und hebräische Lexikographie. pp. 209–266. doi:10.1515/9783110267044.209. ISBN   978-3-11-026612-2. Quote: "Nearly two hundred years later the repertory of Phoenician-Punic epigraphy counts about 10.000 inscriptions from throughout the Mediterranean and its environs."
  30. ↑ The corpus of the Old South Arabic languages has been published in scattered publications and is difficult to survey. The old compilations in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (and RES) contains around 3,000 texts with over 50,000 words, although a (small) part of these texts dates from after 300 AD. Thus, a stock of well over 100,000 words can now be assumed. The Old South Arabic texts are mainly in Sabaean, but also in other languages such as Written in Minaean, Qataban and Hadramautic, although the attribution of some shorter monuments remains uncertain. P. Stein stated in 2007 that there were 10,500 inscriptions, whilst Peust stated with 8,000 inscriptions in 2000. According to Stein, the texts are divided as follows: Sabaean: 5,300 texts; Qataban: 2,000; Minaean: 1,200, Haḍramite: 1,500; other/uncertain: 500. The corpus will be further increased by the chopsticks, which will be published bit by bit. P. Stein in 2007 also estimated the number of words at 112,500, versus Peust's estimate of 100,000 words. According to Stein, the words break down as follows: Sabaean: 85,000 words; Qataban: 11,000; Minaean: 11,000; Haḍramite: 5,000; other: 500.
  31. ↑ Ryckmans, J.; Müller, W.W.; Allāh, Y.M.A. (1994). Textes du Yemen Antique. Inscrits sur bois. Institut Orientaliste Louvain: Publications de l'Institut Orientaliste de Louvain (in French). Université Catholique de Louvain, Institut Orientaliste. ISBN   978-2-87723-104-6. Archived from the original on 2023-05-05. Retrieved 2023-05-05. Mais les données principales sont fournies par plus de 8000 inscriptions monumentales , au texte soigneusement gravé dans la pierre ou coulé dans le bronze
  32. ↑ Quantitatively the best attested language from ancient Italy, after Latin, is Etruscan. The corpus compiled by Helmut Rix counted several thousand almost all very short texts with a total of around 25,000 words.
  33. ↑ Rix, Helmut (1991). Etruskische Texte : editio minor (in German). Tübingen: G. Narr. ISBN   3-8233-4240-1. OCLC   25336064.
  34. ↑ Rao, Rajesh P. N.; Yadav, Nisha; Vahia, Mayank N.; Joglekar, Hrishikesh; Adhikari, R.; Mahadevan, Iravatham (18 August 2009). "A Markov model of the Indus script". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106 (33): 13685–13690. Bibcode:2009PNAS..10613685R. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0906237106 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   2721819 . PMID   19666571.
  35. ↑ Die Lexikographie der Gandharī-Sprache Archived 2023-04-08 at the Wayback Machine , Akademie Aktuell Jahrgang 2013 - Ausgabe Nr. 44, 44-47: "Seit dem erscheinen von Baileys Artikel ist die Materialgrundlage für die Ga-ndha-rī-Lexiko- graphie durch umfangreiche neufunde von handschriften – aber auch inschriften, Verwal- tungsdokumenten und Münzen – um ein Viel- faches angewachsen: Der von uns erstellte catalog of Ga-ndha-rī Texts (http://gandhari.org/ Archived 2013-12-05 at the Wayback Machine catalog) verzeichnet derzeit 77 umfangreiche Schriftrollen, 330 handschriftenfragmente, 834 inschriften, 792 niya-Dokumente und 335 unterschiedliche Münzlegenden mit einem ge- schätzten Textbestand von insgesamt 120.000 Wortbelegen."
  36. ↑ Kingsbury, P. (2002). The Chronology of the Pali Canon: The Case of the Aorists. University of Pennsylvania. ISBN   978-0-493-92911-8 . Retrieved 2023-05-03. The early Buddhist canon written in Pali comprises some 4 million words of text written across several centuries in early India. As such, it is of interest not only to scholars of Buddhism but also linguists and historians for the insight it gives into the social, linguistic, and religious culture of the time.
  37. ↑ Gignoux, P. (1972). Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum: Glossaire des inscriptions pehlevies et parthes (in French). School of Oriental and African Studies. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  38. ↑ MacKenzie, D. N., and Mani. “Mani’s ‘Šābuhragān.’” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 42, no. 3 (1979): 500–534. http://www.jstor.org/stable/615572 Archived 2023-05-05 at the Wayback Machine .; and “Mani’s ‘Šābuhragān’--II.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 43, no. 2 (1980): 288–310. http://www.jstor.org/stable/616043 Archived 2022-10-08 at the Wayback Machine and Hutter, M. (1992). Manis Kosmogonische Šābuhragān-Texte: Edition, Kommentar und literaturgeschichtliche Einordnung der manichäisch-mittelpersischen Handschriften M 98/99 I und M 7980-7984. Studies in Oriental religions (in German). Otto Harrassowitz. ISBN   978-3-447-03227-8. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  39. ↑ Peust 2000, pp. 257–258.
  40. ↑ Sass, Benjamin (1988). The genesis of the alphabet and its development in the second millen̄ium B.C. Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei O. Harrassowitz. ISBN   3-447-02860-2. OCLC   21033775.
  41. ↑ Peust 2000, pp. 257.
  42. ↑ Starke, Frank (1985). Die keilschrift-luwischen Texte in Umschrift (in German). Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz. ISBN   3-447-02349-X. OCLC   12170509.
  43. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Peust 2000, pp. 255.
  44. ↑ Carruba, O. (1970). Das Palaische. Studien zu den Bogazkoy-Texten; hrsg. von der Kommission fur den Alten Orient der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Heft 10 (in German). Harrassowitz. ISBN   978-3-447-01283-6. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  45. ↑ The relevant corpus of hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions was published by H. Cambel after Peust's article
  46. ↑ Tituli Asiae Minoris: Tituli Lyciae lingua lycia conscripti. R.M. Rohrer. 1901. and Neumann, G. (1979). Neufunde lykischer Inschriften seit 1901. Denkschriften (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse) (in German). Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. ISBN   978-3-7001-0283-0. Archived from the original on 2023-05-13. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  47. ↑ Roberto Gusmani (1980–1986). Lydisches Wörterbuch. Mit grammatischer Skizze und Inschriftensammlung (in German). Ergänzungsband 1-3, Heidelberg. and Gusmani, Roberto (1964). Lydisches Wörterbuch (in German). C. Winter. OCLC   582362214.
  48. ↑ Haas, O. (1966). Die phrygischen Sprachdenkmäler. Académie bulgare des sciences linguistiques balkanique (in German). Académie bulgare des sciences. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  49. ↑ Brixhe, C.; Lejeune, M. (1984). Corpus des inscriptions paléo-phrygiennes (in French). Editions Recherche sur les civilisations. ISBN   978-2-86538-089-3 . Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  50. ↑ Lajara, I.J.A.; Neumann, G. (1993). Studia carica: investigaciones sobre la escritura y lengua carias (in Spanish). PPU. ISBN   978-84-477-0236-7. Archived from the original on 2023-05-13. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  51. ↑ Vetter, E. (1953). Handbuch der italischen Dialekte. 1. Reihe: Lehr und Handbücher (in German). C. Winter. ISBN   978-3-8253-5952-2. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  52. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Peust 2000, pp. 258.
  53. ↑ O. Haas, Messapische Studien, Heidelberg 1962 and C. Santoro, Nuovi studi messapici, 2 vols., Lecce 1982/3 and Supplement 1984
  54. ↑ Lejeune, M. (1974). Manuel de la langue vénète. Indogermanische Bibliothek / Lehr- und Handbücher (in French). Winter. ISBN   978-3-533-02353-1.
  55. ↑ Giacomelli, G. (1963). La lingua falisca. Biblioteca di "Studi etruschi" (in Italian). L.S. Olschki.
  56. ↑ Whatmough, Joshua (1969). Dialects of Ancient Gaul. Cambridge: HUP. ISBN   978-0-674-86413-9. OCLC   935283757.
  57. 1 2 3 4 Untermann, J. (1975). Monumenta linguarum Hispanicarum (in German). Ludwig Reichert Verlag. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  58. ↑ Krause, W.; Jankuhn, H. (1966). Die Runeninschriften im älteren Futhark. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse (in German). Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01. and M. Stoklund, Neue Runenfunde in Illerup and Vimose, in Germania 64, 1986, 75ff
  59. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Peust 2000, pp. 259.
  60. ↑ Bernand, E.; Drewes, A.J.; Schneider, R. (1991). Recueil des inscriptions de l'Ethiopie des périodes pré-axoumite et axoumite. Publication of the De Goeje Fund (in French). Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. ISBN   978-3-447-11316-8. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  61. ↑ Chabot, J.B. (1940). Recueil des inscriptions libyques. Gouvernement général de l'Algérie (in French). Imprimerie nationale. and Galand, L. (1966). Inscriptions antiques du Maroc. Etudes d'Antiquités africaines (in French). Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  62. ↑ Török, L. (1997). The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization. Handbook of Oriental Studies / 1: Der Nahe und der Mittlere Osten. Brill. p. 64. ISBN   978-90-04-10448-8.
  63. ↑ Godart, L.; Olivier, J.P. (1976–85). Recueil des inscriptions en linéaire A (in French). P. Geuthner. ISBN   978-2-86958-470-9. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  64. ↑ Poursat, J.C.; Godart, L.; Olivier, J.P. (1978). Le Quartier Mu: Introduction générale. Ecriture hiéroglyphique crétoise / par Louis Godart et Jean-Pierre Olivier. 1. Fouilles Exécutées à Mallia (in French). P. Geuthner. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  65. ↑ Duhoux, Y. (1982). L'étéocrétois: les textes, la langue (in French). J.C. Gieben. ISBN   978-90-70265-05-2. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  66. ↑ Masson, O. (1961). Les inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques: recueil critique et commenté. École français d'Athènes: Études chypriotes (in French). E. de Boccard. Archived from the original on 2023-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-01.

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