Latin Historical Dictionary and Linguistic Encyclopedia – DHELL

Our project will provide a linguistic and philological panorama of the Latin language using the techniques of contemporary linguistics. We are aiming at a wide public in this: academics (latinists, linguists and non-specialists), students and the informed public at large. The participants are recognised specialists in their areas. They will present the subject matter with the scientific rigour to be expected of them, but in a way whose clarity will also make it usable by non-specialists. Our key "deliverable" will be a web site, made up of 4 parts containing many correspondences and links between each of them.
The 1st part will be a dictionary of Latin lexemes in alphabetical order, both words with a lexical meaning (e.g. laus "praise", gloria "glory") and with a grammatical function (e.g. connectors, subordinators, etc.). Each word will have its own entry covering the essential aspects: written form, phonetics, phonology, morphology, distribution, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, situation among the diastratic variations, synchronic analysis, etymology, descendants in the Romance languages. The project will bring important new elements: lexemes with pragmatic functions have never before been presented in a dictionary, and our analyses of semantic developments will be new, exploiting the techniques of contemporary semantics. The dictionary will also be the result of a synchronic approach to the Latin lexicon, developed in the last few decades, that has never been explained in a single work. The methodology to be used for etymologies will include a synthesis of the current hypotheses on the subject, without limiting ourselves to any one school of thought in particular.
The 2nd part of the website will deal with Latin technical vocabularies and will be of considerable interest for the history of science. By a lexical analysis of the Latin words used for surveying, geology, etc., one can see the driving concepts at work. This part will also cover the vocabulary of rhetoric, biblical terminology (the passage from Hebrew to Latin, and from the Greek Septuagint to Latin), naming of Christian entities, the vocabulary of sculpture, theatre, legal terminology. There will be computerised links wherever the same lexeme is treated in part 1 and also as a specialist term in part 2.
The 3rd part will contain a synthesis of the 3 main categories of word formation in Latin: suffixation, inherited compounds and agglutination. Words will be classified here in groups depending on their type of formation, and there will also be links where the same words are also found in parts 1 and 2. For example, there will be a link connecting aratrum « plough » in the 1st part with the instrumental suffix –trum in the 3rd part.
The 4th part of the website will constitute an "encyclopedia" of contemporary Latin linguistics in the form of a list of terms and concepts used in the 3 other parts, and will define each of them, with examples taken from Latin, in the framework of Latin linguistics. Since some of these terms are specific to a given "school", this 4th part will also present a panorama of the major European schools that have been driving Latin linguistics thought since the 1970s and 1980s.
All 4 parts of the project are complimentary to one another and constitute a multidimensional approach to the Latin language. The form of the dictionary, in reality, is used here in order to present our readers with the totality of linguistic and philological knowledge of the Latin language. A major advantage of using the internet is that we will not have to wait until the completion of the project before we can publish our results. Work will be made available as it is produced. By being on line, we will overcome the main problems associated with the production of a dictionary in paper format. The website will be a permanently available tool and will significantly advance scientific research.