LiteRaS · Allographic LITERacy: Arabic texts in non Arabic-Script across Middle Eastern Manuscript Tradition

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Project objective

LiteRaS is an interdisciplinary project combining Arabic linguistics, manuscript studies, and Digital Humanities. It investigates Arabic-language texts written in non-Arabic scripts that never developed into sustained literary traditions, focusing on Arabic in Greek, Coptic, Latin, and Ethiopian scripts. These cases are typically linked to peripheral Arabic-speaking Christian communities within the Arabicate world. The project aims to reconstruct the orthographic, linguistic, and visual features of these allographic practices from manuscript witnesses. This characterization will in turn provide the basis for a broader historical, social, and anthropological interpretation, showing how these writing phenomena reflected and shaped cultural identities in the politically charged pre-modern Middle East. The project pursues three main objectives:- creating an open-access, tagged digital archive of Arabic allographic texts, serving as a reference hub for study and preservation;- defining orthographic and linguistic features in individual manuscripts and comparing them across traditions, revealing how Arabic was adapted to diverse language communities and contexts;- applying computational tools for visual manuscript analysis to study handwriting as a marker of literacy, identifying individual scribes and regional styles.The findings will advance research in Arabic and related fields, while offering new insights into the multilingual and multiscriptal literacy of the communities involved and into the cultural significance of writing Arabic in non-Arabic scripts. The project will be hosted at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, with an outgoing phase at New York University Abu Dhabi and a secondment at the University of Hamburg. Through this mobility plan, the fellow will gain expertise in Arabic manuscript studies, Arab crossroads literature, and advanced digital tools for manuscript analysis, receiving interdisciplinary training crucial to a strong career impact.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA TOR VERGATA · RomaCoordinatorItaly
• New York University in Abu Dhabi Corporation · Abu DhabiUnited Arab Emirates
• UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG · HamburgGermany

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101281167