The MEaning of LAnguage

 

MELA is the ERC-funded Consolidator Grant, led by Andrea Cuomo, dedicated to Byzantine textbooks and the teaching of high-register Medieval Greek.

 

Multiple linguistic registers coexisting within the same language, alongside the codification of one register as a ‘standard’, are phenomena common to many linguistic traditions. Greek offers a particularly striking case: throughout its long history, a high‑register variety has existed in constant interaction with lower‑register forms, in a relationship of competition and mutual influence.

While recent scholarship has focused primarily on either the post‑classical or the early modern and modern phases of this development, the central Byzantine period—crucial for understanding the evolution of the language—has received comparatively little attention. Yet the late Byzantine era preserves exceptional evidence in the form of school textbooks and manuscripts, which provide direct insight into medieval users’ attitudes toward their language.

Within this context, the ERC‑funded project MELA – The Meaning of Language argues that an innovative combination of philological and palaeographical approaches, enriched by Digital Humanities, sociolinguistics, and semiotics, can transform our understanding of Medieval Greek language and literature.

Through initiatives such as the Ghent Textbooks Project, MELA aims to place Medieval Greek at the center of contemporary linguistic debate by creating the infrastructure for the first Digital Grammar of the high‑register Greek taught in late Byzantine schools and by developing a new theoretical framework for studying language standardization and the dynamic relations between language, society, meaning-making, and the human mind.

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The Ghent Textbooks Project (GTP)

The documents presented here are developed for internal use and are intended to demonstrate the working methods of the Ghent Textbooks Project (GTP) as it creates a Catalogue of Manuscripts and lays the groundwork for the editions of textbooks for the teaching of grammar or Grammatici Graeci Byzantini (GGB), and for the MELA infrastructure for the Digital Grammar of the Greek taught at schools in the Palaeologan era (MELA DG).

For the first phase (2022 – 2027), the entry point are the currently known manuscripts that preserve the grammatical works by Maximos Planoudes, Manuel Moschopoulos, Nikephoros Gregoras, Georgios Lakapenos, Thomas Magistros, Ioannes Glykys, and Andreas Lopadiotes (→ MELA Sources Manuscripts). We need this document because we want to share it with colleagues in order to lay hands on, e.g., private descriptions of manuscripts, photographic archives, etc.

The aims are (1) to categorize each textbook with any grammatical content – that be preserved in any manuscript of the Palaeologan era – by the multiple criteria of title and incipit as well as content/focus/grammatical topics, (2) to connect each textbook to all the manuscripts in which it is contained, and (3) to make textbooks available both as such ((edited) text and annotated translation), and by transferring their content into other formats (digital grammar; prosopographical repertoires; etc.).

Overall, the present endeavors are designed to help us develop a system to map all surviving manuscripts of the Byzantine period containing textbooks – alongside all their historical data, and track down their content. The repository of data will enable us to discover new associations between manuscripts, grammatical texts therein contained, people, and space that are so far inconceivable. The textual corpus database, which includes both textbooks and actual texts, will enable us to build the MELA DG, for us to know what kind of Greek emerges from the grammar books.

Some occasional grammatical textbooks are already available in print in what we call Master Texts. These printed versions constitute the basic point of reference for the recording or the transcription of occasional textbooks as they are encountered in each manuscript.

The GTP has created searchable Word documents of the most common editions (→ Bibliography of Master Texts_Template). At the initiative of the GTP, many grammar books of the Palaeologan era have also been made available through the searchable database of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.

For a detailed study of manuscript textbooks and the grammatical texts they contain, the Ghent Textbooks Project has created the following templates for ten levels of description. The templates contain the properties that characterize a given object. The database built upon these templates will enable discriminating objects according to their characteristics, establish relationships among objects and characteristics, and search among all data.

1. Manuscript Description = MELAMA. The first step is a short and project-relevant description of the entire manuscript (→ Template Description). Clues to the use of a manuscript in space and time and of its textbooks can be gathered from the provenance history, codicology, marginal annotations, and the presence of personal names, possession notes, etc. → Here is one example of manuscript description of Hagion Oros, Monê Ibêrôn, 79 (Diktyon: 23676).

2. Contents of Poorly Described Grammatical Texts = MELATE. If a manuscript contains occasional textbooks (not all manuscripts described in published catalogues provide a clear description of such texts, while they often just say Grammatical Text, Varia Lexicographica, etc.), the contents of the relevant folia is noted in detail (→ Template Contents), and traces of use are recorded, such as wax drops, darkened edges, or textual emendations by later users, any trace of readings and use. If available, reference is made to printed editions of the fuzzy textbooks, so that further research is made possible: e.g. to state whether the ‘grammatical text’ in question is an excerpt of a known textbook, a re-work/re-adaptation, or whether it just resembles affinities to currently known texts. Here is one example of content description from Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, 2638, (Diktyon: 9735).

2a. Transcription of (short) Poorly Described Grammatical Texts. If there is no printed record of a grammatical text, it is transcribed (→ Template Transcription of Textbooks), following certain guidelines (→ MELA Transcription Rules). Here is an example of two transcribed grammatical texts from XYZ.

2b. Update of the Catalogue of Manuscripts. Once the description of a manuscript is complete (points 1 – 3), this information is added and updated in the Catalogue of Manuscripts. In GTP’s Database, we upload the currently available description of each manuscript in the form of a scanned page, which will be gradually replaced by our work as we proceed with the descriptions. Here is the current entry in the MELA Catalogue of Manuscripts for XYZ (Zoom in to see the content).

2c. Critical Editions. Ideally, texts containing observations on grammar, language, and language use from the Byzantine period will be published in the Grammatici Graeci Byzantini series.

3. Prosopography = MELAPER. The manuscript textbooks examined by the GTP are, in various capacities, linked to people. If correctly recorded, the Prosopographical data hidden in manuscripts enable us to better contextualize the textbooks, their content, their history, etc. (→ Template MELAPER (Description of Prosopographical Material)).

4. Scientific resources = MELALI. GTP is building an archive of catalogues, monographs, critical editions, scientific studies, for internal usage only. The digitized copies of GTP’s scientific resources are listed according our categorization system (→ Template MELALI).

5. Grammatical Themes = MELAGRA. As our research gradually analyzes textbooks, we build a list of grammatical themes. This is not a list of all possible grammatical topics, which one would expect to find in a grammar book. This is the record of all grammatical themes, which appear in our sources (→ Template MELAGRA (Grammatical topics)).

6. Archivum Photographicum = MELAPHO. GTP is building an archive of photographs mapping each manuscript mentioned in our database. Any piece of information pertaining to the nature of the photographs taken during our fieldwork (technical properties; copyright; etc.) are registered according to → Template MELAPHO.

7. MELATO toponyms.

8. MELADA dates.

9. MELAVO vocabulary. Words object of grammatical attention, Byzantine grammatical jargon, words mentioned in grammatical examples are lemmatized and described according to → Template MELAVO.

10. MELARE = Contrast of registers. Byzantine textbooks for the teaching of grammar often describe a phenomenon (lemma, syntactic construction, grammatical theme) by presenting its behavior in different registers of the Greek of the time. This precious set of examples (contrasting e.g. Koinè, Demotic, High-register, Poetic Greek), if correctly recorded, enables us to create a contrastive dictionary of the registers of the Greek of the time (→ Template MELARE (Contrastive Dictionary)).

 

MELA has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101001328)