Eugenia Beu-Dachin Home institution Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca Country Romania MULTILINGUA Fellowship February-November 2005 Project The Latin Language in the Inscriptions from Roman Dacia

The topic of this research is the linguistic study of the more than 4000 Latin inscriptions of the Roman Province Dacia. The aim of this research is to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the Latin language was assimilated in the different parts of the multilingual Roman Empire. Latin epigraphs provide important clues about this linguistic integration. In order to facilitate this work and do it accurately, a corpus of the inscriptions is being built. The inscriptions have been encoded using TEI XML, and transformations have been applied using XSL style sheets to render full text editions at the different levels of coding. Standards set out in The Menota handbook were followed throughout; expertise regarding these standards is available in Bergen. Each XML file consists in two parts: the header and the text. The information concerning each inscription (editor, publication, recording, bibliography, date, and so on) is included in the header. The text part of the XML file includes only the original Latin text. The Inscriptions were encoded on three different levels: facsimile (the text is represented exactly as it appears on the ancient material), diplomatic (this provides the version which is given by the editor of the text, abbreviations are expanded using special marks) and normalized (at this level, each word is represented in accordance with the grammatical rules, so the text corresponds to a literary version). Almost 900 inscriptions were coded during the research stay at Bergen, with the help of experts and available tools. Based on this corpus, a concordance of words will be made in order to study the deviation between classical Latin and the Latin in the inscriptions, analyzing the peculiarities of the Vulgar Latin.