Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) - Han xue wen dian 漢學文典
The Project
The Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) is an Historical and Comparative Encyclopaedia of Chinese Conceptual Schemes. TLS is designed as as a collaborative forum for discussion on the close reading of Chinese texts. It provides a corpus of classical Chinese texts wherever possible with interlinear translations and links the texts incorporated with an analytic dictionary of the Chinese language. It pays special attention to historical keywords. TLS works towards a cross-cultural study of conceptual history. It compiles a detailed synonym dictionary of Chinese and systematically organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic hierarchies of synonym groups. TLS develops a system of syntactic categories for the analysis of Chinese texts, a system of rhetorical devices for the analysis of Chinese texts, and deploys a system of standard semantic relations, aiming to define the Chinese conceptual space as a relational space. TLS seeks to make available up-to-date databases on historical phonology and the history of Chinese characters.
Founding Editor: Christoph Harbsmeier 何莫邪; Associate Editor: Jiang Shaoyu 蔣紹愚
General Editor: Christian Schwermann 史克禮; Technical Editor: Christian Wittern 維習安
The Project received its first major “Grant for Outstanding Research in the Humanities” from the Norwegian Research Council in 1989. At Heidelberg University it was supported by the Institute of Chinese Studies and later the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”. For further information please refer to the full “Acknowledgement” by Prof. Harbsmeier from 2007 (Internet Archive).
Digital Output
The TLS was originally developed as Filemaker database. In the first decade of the 2000s, a frontend was developed providing online access to the filemaker data. During the first decades of the project, development was in the hands of Jens Østergaard Petersen (Copenhagen). In the 2010s, the data was gradually migrated into an eXIst-db. As such it is available today at the Han xue wen dian website: TLS - Thesaurus Linguae Sericae / 漢學文典 : 中經西譯剖析比錄.
Data sets
The data and the related eXist-db application for presenting the “Thesaurus Linguae Sinicae (TLS) - an Historical and Comparative Encyclopaedia of Chinese Conceptual Schemes” on the web have been made available on GitHub. The TLS app consists of two data packages, “tls-data” containig the lexical part of the database, and “tls-texts” containing the source texts. Main development is in the hand of Christian Wittern (Kyoto).
