CLaSSES: a New Digital Resource for Latin Epigraphy

Abstract

CLaSSES (Corpus for Latin Sociolinguistic Studies on Epigraphic textS) is an annotated corpus aimed at (socio)linguistic research on Latin inscriptions. Provided with linguistic, extra- and meta-linguistic features, it can be used to perform quantitative and qualitative variationist analyses on Latin epigraphic texts. In particular, it allows the user to analyze spelling (and possibly phonetic-phonological) variants and to interpret them with reference to the dating, the provenance place, and the type of the texts. This paper presents the first macro-section of CLaSSES, focused on inscriptions of the archaic and early periods (CLaSSES I).