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 collects 1184 inscriptions from Sardinia, 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). It is also possible to verify whether the lemmas found in CLaSSES are also attested in other textual and lexical sources since each token is linked to its respective lemma included in LiLa – Knowledge Base of Interoperable Linguistic Resources for Latin. LiLa is a collection of both lexical and textual resources for Latin (corpora, lexica, ontologies, dictionaries, thesauri) made interoperable following the principles of the Linked Data paradigm. The link to LiLa can be accessed by clicking on the LiLa logo on the Research page of each section.
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