Corpus Tannaiticum: the Mishnah

Corpus Tannaiticum: the Mishnah

What is the project about?

(read here on the Mishnah)

The CT-Mishna project aims to publish

• an editio critica minor of the Mishnah based on the oldest complete manuscripts, three manuscripts of the Palestinian and one of the Babylonian text version:
• K - Kaufman A50 of the Hungarian Academy of the Sciences, acc. to Krupp from 10th or 11th century Palestine or Southern Italy, according to Schlanger from the 12th century Italy
• C - Add. 470.1 of the Cambridge University Library, written maybe in the 15th century in a Byzantine semi-cursive
• P - de Rossi 138 in Parma, written in 1073, probably in Southern Italy, and was part of the same codex as ms heb. 31 from the Vatican Library, a Sifra manuscript (Krupp, Tarbitz 1980)
• M - Cod. hebr. 95 from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München (a manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud including the Mishnah, written in France 1342)
• V - the Mishna as in the Vilna edition of the Babylonian Talmud
• with a French translation
• and a historical commentary
• a Mishnaic-Hebrew to French lexique

Both the edition cum translation and commentary as well as the lexique shall be published electronically and in print. The electronic version shall be highly interactive, permit the user to navigate between crossreferenced items inside and outside the database, choose which modules to visualize, how and where, contain e.g. lexical and grammatical tagging linked to the lexique, toponymns and prosopographical information. This is obviously a longterm project, which is supposed to be the first step to a comprehensive treatment of the other Tannaitic treatises, i.e. the Tosefta and the Halakhic Midrashim.

Where we are currently

• electronic infrastructure:We have created an SQL database that currently permits
  • a quasi-facsimilé presentation of manuscript witnesses according to various css-like styles
  • automatic alignment of manuscripts thanks to the CollateX algorithms written by the interedition.eu team
  • a toolbox makes it possible to auto-evaluate the most current forms of relationships (i.e. add article or copula, orthographic difference, shel written separately or jointly)
  • manual correction of the alignment accordingt to the ingenious structure of the Göttingen Qumranwörterbuch and an rdf-like categorization of the relation between two aligned elements
• manuscripts: We are currently finalizing a transcription of manuscript K based on Michael Krupp's transcription, completed and considerably enriched. Using word styles, the transcription tags paratextual elements such as linefillers, internal numbering, the placement of marginal additions, changes e.g. indicated by vocalization only, We are working towards a facsimilé edition with the Hungarian Academy. Michael Krupp has been so kind to generously transfer many transcriptions of other manuscripts, many of which wait to be converted from Tustep to xml/sql. We received a couple of them as txt files, are correcting them and enriching them in close collaboration with Hayim Lapin. We have transcribed several other treatises from C, P and M and shared them with our partners.
• translation: Ron Naiweld is preparing a translation of the three Bave. Daniel Stökl has translated Yoma.
• commentary: Daniel Stökl has commented upon Yoma.
• grammatical tagging: NEW and MUCH updated: We have a parsed version of Vilna thanks to the automatic parser of Meni Adler and in collaboration with Hayim Lapin. As this parser was trained on modern Hebrew the results have to be corrected, which we are preparing in collabroation with Karl-Heinz Mörth and the VLE (as we are still learning the annotation code, please disregard the mistakes. This page serves to visualize what we are doing). We are preparing the transfer and adapation of these tags to ms Kaufman.
• NEW: alignment of transcription and glyphs: for a very finegrained (letter by letter) electronic facsimilé and automatic palaeography thanks to algorithms developed and implemented by Gil Sadeh, Tal Hassner, Lior Wolf and Nachum Dershowitz. Please see an example here.
• lexique: We are currently finalizing a digital version of the list of non-Biblical words from Albeck focusing on the Greek and Latin loanwords.