5th International Conference ALIENTO: Linguistic and intercultural analysis of short sapiential statements and of their transmission East/West, West/East

Nancy – Paris 5 – 6 – 7 November 2013

Ethical and moral concepts between the three cultures

This 5th edition, which concerns the construction of the database, will focus on the way in which the three cultures in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages interpret, translate and conceive such key concepts as, for instance, charity, alms, equity, prudence and speech.

What semantic content is transferred from one culture to another, how the appropriations and the re-appropriations (i. e.: semantic calques and metaphorical transfers).

What ethical or moral concepts are easily or arduously translatable and why.

What are the complex architectures or networks that interconnect these concepts within a given culture and how these architectures or networks differ or not from those in the neighbouring culture (a Latin term may contain senses coming from semantically close terms from the donor language due to cultural affinity or language contact. We will consider as well the incorporation of Arabic semes into the Spanish language of the Middle Ages, the choices made by the translator from Arabic into Hebrew, the translation equivalences which might have occurred at that time).

We will address the question of the semantic circulation by starting from the semantic contents of the concepts that shape the moral and ethical ideas in the sapiential texts that were exchanged in the Iberian Peninsula, between the 11th and 15th centuries. These texts are the core material of the research project ALIENTO.

We will focus also on the dictionaries, the compilations, the philosophical anthologies (contemporary or not) which give a reading of the conceptual arborescence (or organisation) specific to each culture.

If we address the linguistic and automatic treatment of the data, we could consider the question of the ontologies as they are developed and questioned today by semanticists and computer researchers.

Workshops will be dedicated to problems concerning the encoding of the texts and to questions related to the linguistic description of the languages of the corpora, namely Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish and Catalan.

Articles will be published in the journal: ALIENTO – Echanges Sapientiels en Méditerranée

Abstracts should be submitted by July 15th, 2013 to:

Marie-Christine Bornes Varol Professeur des Universités (INALCO - Paris) CERMOM EA 4091 Porteur du projet ALIENTO www.aliento.eu 00 33 (0) 1 40 05 98 83 varol@noos.fr

Marie-Sol Ortola Professeur des Universités (UdL Nancy) Directrice adjointe de l’équipe « LIS » EA 7305 Porteur du projet ALIENTO www.aliento.eu 00 33 (0) 3 83 73 83 01 marie-sol.ortola@univ-lorraine.fr

Description of the ALIENTO project (Linguistic and intercultural analysis of short sapiential statements and of their transmission East/West, West/East)

In the ninth century, the rich Arab tradition of the adab finds its way into Spain, or rather al-Andalus, a country that played a prominent role in the exchange of knowledge from the East to the West in the 11th and 12th centuries especially via the monasteries in the North of the Iberian Peninsula. It is also in al-Andalus where the adab literature meets the Jewish sapiential tradition of the Midrashic literature. New collections are composed, including original works from the 10th and 11th centuries, and from the 12th century on, exempla and philosophers’ sayings are translated into Hebrew, Latin and the Romance languages. Much of this complex heritage is found in the extensive Spanish paremiological literature, which is at its highest in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as in contemporary Spanish, Judeo-Spanish and Maghrebian collections of proverbs.

Although the main lines of these exchanges are well-known, we still lack specific information on the circulation of these short sapiential statements (our basic research units) as well as on the successive translating choices made by the translators, their cultural reinterpretations or the importance of some loanwords over others. If sapiential textual filiations and translation sequences should be treated cautiously, this is particularly true of the sapiential statements to be found in these texts. Due to the difficulty in understanding them, these volatile elements, whose categorisation varies with time and cultures, have never been the subject of a comprehensive textual study which could recount their sources, circulation and evolution across the different spoken or written languages of the three cultures living in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle-Ages. The paremiological studies have mostly produced compilations of proverbs (thesauri), critical editions and erudite studies, dedicated to a single work, a single language or a single culture, except for the remarkable ground-breaking work on the Philosophical Quartet (1975) by D. Gutas. The few existing databases are for the most part monolingual contemporary corpora of paremiae or otherwise have a translation-based perspective.

Therefore the aim of the ALIENTO project is to work out concordances, even partial, close or distant connections, in order to reassess inter-textual relations by comparing a great quantity of data and by interconnecting encoded texts written in different languages.

This is why the project, which needs a close interdisciplinary collaboration between computational researchers (ATILF), linguists and specialists in literature (MSH Lorraine + INALCO and the international network of collaborators), will develop a piece of software transferable to other similar texts to be used with a large reference corpus made up of 8 related texts 582 pages for an estimated 9,570 sapiential statements, which circulated in the Iberian Peninsula (in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and Catalan). The produced software will extract and connect short sapiential statements through concordances generated by the specific encoding system scientifically developed and explained in an encoding manual XML-TEI. ATILF will create a multilingual interrogation programme (in French, Spanish and English) of the matched data and will give access online to the ALIENTO corpus annotated texts via the CNRTL in order to ensure a permanent archiving of the texts.

At the end of the project we will have:

 a body of texts in a multilingual corpus, digitised, tagged in XML/TEI and publicly accessible, linked to a set of data about the texts and their authors.  a set of short sapiential units with their XML/TEI annotations, accessible free of charge.  a trilingual questioning interface that will display the concordanced statements contained in these works, with information that could be used to study them, irrespective of the language.  an encoding methodology and a piece of software for matching data that could be used with other similar corpora.

Considerations arising from the project:

The aim of the project consists in reviewing the role of the Iberian Peninsula in the transfer and exchange of the sapiential knowledge from the East to the West and from the West to the East in the Middle Ages by studying the brief sapiential statements they contain (maxims, sentences, proverbes, aphorisms). The raised issues are: 1) Which are the precise links between the exchanged sapiential texts between different languages, different cultures and three religions in the Iberian Peninsula (and Provence) in the Middle Ages? 2) What changes were brought about by the translations, re-interpretations and readings, contained in the numerous works and compilations written between the 9th and 15th centuries? 3) Starting from the ancient sapiential sources, how do we get to the modern and contemporary Mediterranean collections of proverbs