The Transmission and Transformation of Texts in the Tarim Basin: a corpus approach

The ""Transmission and Transformation of Texts in the Tarim Basin: a corpus approach"" project (4TB) is designed to contribute to the study of three prominent languages of the pre-Islamic Tarim Basin (in todays Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the Peoples Republic of China): Tocharian A, Old Uyghur, and Sanskrit.

The innovation part of this contribution assumes creating a comprehensive parallel text corpus of Buddhist texts in the said languages, an open-access digital tool for linguistic and philological study.

The research part assumes analyzing details and searching for patterns of transmission and transformation of those Buddhist texts, from Sanskrit to Tocharian A, from Tocharian A to Old Uyghur.

This is going to be achieved by answering the following research questions: 1) What are the linguistic patterns of transmission and transformation of the discussed texts? 2) How were the discussed texts transmitted and transformed from the philological point of view?The results of my action will substantially facilitate cross-linguistic studies for scholars of three language groups.

Also, they will have an interdisciplinary impact, bringing a large amount of textual information to non-linguist researchers, e.g., scholars of Buddhism and historians. Moreover, my action has a potential for further research, as it can later include other adjacent languages. The host institution will be University of Vienna.

My supervisor will be Hannes Fellner, one of the key developers of the CEToM project (the Tocharian A and B text corpus) and the lead of the Tarim Brahmi project. His experience in Digital Humanities and the Tocharian studies will be extremely helpful for my research.