CLaSSES is a digital resource which gathers non-literary Latin texts (epigraph, writing tablets, letters) of different periods and provinces of the Roman Empire. This corpus has been tagged with linguistic and extra-linguistic information that allows to analyze the spelling variations in Latin epigraphic sources in the light of the sociolinguistic context of the Roman world.
CLaSSES is structured in four different sections. The first section, Rome and Italy, collects more than 1200 Latin inscriptions, dating between the 6th BC and 1st AD, mainly from Rome and Central Italy. The second section, Roman Britain, gathers 761 ink-written tablets from Vindolanda. The third section, Egypt and Eastern Mediterranean, gathers 219 letters dating between the 1st century BC and the 6th century AD from the North-African and Near-East areas. The fourth section at the moment collects 496 inscriptions from Sardinia (688 new inscriptions will be added soon), dating between the 1st century BC and the 7th century AD.
CLaSSES allows you to conduct searches on each section by matching and exporting different types of data, such as text type, place of origin and dating of each text. In addition, it is possible to search for specific linguistic phenomena of spelling variation (only for registered users).
The Database was developed at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics of the University of Pisa, within the research project Linguistic representations of identity. Sociolinguistic models and historical linguistics (National Coordinator: Piera Molinelli, PRIN2010, prot. 2010HXPFF2_001; see http://www.mediling.eu/ for further information).
Principal Investigator: Giovanna Marotta
Collaborators: Serena Barchi, Francesca Cotugno, Irene De Felice, Margherita Donati, Francesco Rovai, Lucia Tamponi.
Corpora