TheThesaurus Linguae Graecae(TLG) is a research center at theUniversity of California, Irvine.The TLG was founded in 1972 byMarianne McDonald(a graduate student at the time and now a professor of theater and classics at theUniversity of California, San Diego) with the goal to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving texts written in Greek from antiquity to the present era. Since 1972, the TLG has collected and digitized most surviving literary texts written inGreekfromHomerto thefall of Constantinoplein 1453 CE, and beyond.Theodore Brunner(1934–2007) directed the project from 1972 until his retirement from the University of California in 1998.Maria Pantelia,also a classics professor at UC Irvine, succeeded Theodore Brunner in 1998, and has been directing the TLG since. TLG's name is shared with its online database, the full title of which isThesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature(theTLG,in italics, for short).[1]
The challenge of this huge undertaking was originally met with the help of several classicists and technology experts but primarily thanks to the efforts ofDavid W. Packardand his team who created the Ibycus system, the hardware and software originally used to proofread and search the corpus. Packard also developedBeta code,a character and formatting encoding convention used to encodePolytonic Greek.The collection was originally circulated onCD-ROM.The first CD-ROM was released in 1985, and was the first compact disc that did not contain music. Subsequent versions were released in 1988 and in 1992, thanks to technical support provided by Packard.
By the late 1990s, it became obvious that the old Ibycus technology was outdated. Under the direction of Professor Maria Pantelia, a number of new projects were undertaken, including the massive migration out of Ibycus, the development of a new system to digitize, proofread, and manage the textual collection, a new CD-ROM (TLG E), released in 1999, and eventually the move of the corpus to the web environment in 2001. At the same time, the TLG started working with theUnicode Technical Committeeto include all characters needed to encode and display Greek in the Unicode standard. The corpus continues to be expanded significantly to includeByzantine,medieval,and eventuallymodern Greektexts. More recent projects include thelemmatizationof the Greek corpus (2006) – a substantial undertaking, given the highly inflected nature of Greek and the complexity of the corpus, covering more than two millennia of literary development – and the Online Liddell–Scott–JonesGreek–English Lexicon(commonly referred to as the LSJ), released in February 2011.
Since 2001, the TLG corpus has been searchable online by members of subscribing institutions, which number close to 1500 worldwide. All bibliographical information and a subset of the texts are available to the general public.
The number of Greek words in the corpus amounts to 110 million,[2]while the number of unique wordforms amount to 1.6 million and the number of unique lemmata to 250,000.[3]
See also
editReferences
edit- ^"TLG – Home".Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature.University of California, Irvine: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. 2017.RetrievedDecember 10,2017.
- ^"About".Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature.University of California, Irvine: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. 2017.RetrievedDecember 10,2017.
- ^"Statistics"(PDF).Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature.University of California, Irvine: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. 2017.RetrievedDecember 10,2017.