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PHI PROJECTS

In addition, we have a number of other ongoing projects – some individual projects, others conducted by several of PHI's fellows or are joint projects with external partners.

SCROLL DOWN FOR A COMPLETE LIST OF ALL ONGOING PROJECTS

An important initiative to promote linguistic heritage is Language, Legacy and Landey, which presents Afghan women's poetry to a Norwegian and an international audience.

We also organise a number of weekly philological research seminars and offer introductory courses in several languages.

LIST OF ALL PHI PROJECTS

BIBLIOTHECA POLYGLOTTA

A digital corpus of major historical multilingual texts, i.e. religious, scientific or otherwise culturally significant texts which have been translated into several languages because of their perceived importance – and hence, their subsequent influence beyond the culture in which they were originally created.

 

The BP contains major texts from the Buddhist canon, a substantial corpus of Old Norse literature, and a steadily increasing number of Classical Greek texts with their Arabic and Latin translations.

LANGUAGE, LEGACY AND LANDEY

The project was established to edit and translate old landey poems collected by the Norwegian linguist Georg Morgenstierne, to collect new landeys from Afghans in Norway and elsewhere, and to organise a number of scholarly and public events in Oslo and other Norwegian cities.

LIBRARY OF OLD NORSE

A digital corpus of Old Norse texts with modern translatons

THE EUCLIDEAN TRADITION AND THE SEMANTICS OF MATHEMATICS

An online multilingual edition of Euclid's Elements, in the original Greek and the ancient translations into Arabic, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and Chinese

ORIENTAL AND ISLAMIC MANUSCRIPTS IN THE NORWEGIAN NATIONAL LIBRARY

Cataloguing, digitising and investigating the origins of this precious collection of books and documents in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages.

MULTILINGUAL HISTORICAL KORAN

A digital edition and study of the Koran and its earliest translations

THE MUQADDIMA OF IBN KHALDUN IN OTTOMAN TURKISH

A study of the two Ottoman Turkish translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima. Se preliminary edition of text here.

ARISTOTLE'S RHETORIC FROM EAST TO WEST

A pilot edition and study of the Arabic translation and Herman's Latin translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric.

ARABIC PAPYRI IN OSLO UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

A study and catalogue of the Arabic papyri in the Oslo collection

DEPENDENT LANGUAGES

Description

MULTILINGUAL IBSEN

A presentation of the works of Henrik Ibsen in the original Norwegian together with translations into various languages, such as English, French, German, Finnish, Russian, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. The translations are as a rule the first published translations in the language in question.

CUNEIFORM MULTILINGUALS

"Cuneiform Multilinguals" is a project to comparatively study bilingual inscriptions in cuneiform. There is a fairly extensive literature of bilingual texts from the 3rd millenium BC and later, written in the cuneiform languages Sumerian and Akkadian, Hittite and Ugaritic, Old Persian and Elamite.

The employment of the cuneiform alphabet by multiple languages is an expression of a cultural and political unity or relation. The relationship between these can be investigated as a Sprachbund. 

A Hittite-Akkadian bilingual has already been edited on the Bibliotheca Polyglotta in cooperation with Lisa Wilhelmi, based on her doctoral dissertation. There is also preliminary work of Bjarte Kaldhol on a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual with a glossary.

BODHISATVAPIṬAKA

The Bodhisatvapiṭaka is a Mahāyānasūtra from the 2nd century AD, and is extant in Tibetan and two Chinese translations. Recently PHI got a Sanskrit MS from Lhasa through the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This MS has been edited by Fredrik Liland, Kazunobu Matsuda and Jens Braarvig, and will be published in 2018, with an English translation.

The Linguistic Atlas of Afghanistan was a massive and ambitious project undertaken in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s. The primary European scholars involved in the original research were Georg Morgenstierne, Georges Redard and Charles Kieffer. Little of this mass of data has been made public.

PHI is involved in efforts to do research on these materials and publish the results.

AVATAṂSAKA

The Avataṃsaka (Chinese: Huáyán, Korean: Hwaeom, Japanese: Kegon, Vietnamese: Hoa-nghiêm) has had a great impact in many Asian countries, historically, but also into the present.

 

PHI has initiated a project to document the original literature of the Avataṃsaka and all its translations and transformations throughout East Asian history. One will document the Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan literature belonging to this cycle of texts, but also its political, cultural and religious impact into the present in the various East Asian countries.

ASHOKA INSCRIPTIONS

The Inscriptions of Ashoka are published on Bibliotheca Polyglotta, based on Hultzsch’ original work with rubbings and translations beside the original Ardha-Maghadhi. Professor Harry Falk, Berlin, has given PHI all his photo documentations of the inscriptions, and we plan to publish them online with the texts. This initiative is a cooperation with Austin University, Texas.

 

One will also make a new edition of the Aramaic and Greek Ashoka-inscriptions.

SILK ROAD LANGUAGES

Uighur, Buddhist multilingualism, Dungan, Arabic in Uzbekistan.

A description of this project will be posted later.

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