Title: Genesis Rabbah loanwords

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  project summary

  This project focuses on the role of Greek loanwords in Genesis Rabbah (GenR) in illuminating the way in which the Jews interacted with the Greco-Roman culture and their thoughts in Late Antiquity. The first rabbinic commentary on Genesis, GenR, which was collected in 5th-century Roman Palestine, contains over two thousand Greek loanwords, and is the largest collection of non-native words in rabbinic literature.

Through these borrowings across dialects of the Greek language, the project examines the richness and nature of the cultural interaction as represented through language. The project will generate a digital dictionary of such terms in TEI format to aid in the linguistic, philological, and cultural analysis, and aid in cultural contact and sociolinguistic research.

Finally, one should discover new dimensions of Jewish intellectual history, concentrating on language contact. Process, Resources, Delivery. The project starts with the work on the text of GenR and Greek loanwords in it, as suggested by Drucker.These are considered to be cultural and linguistic artifacts and are digitized and marked up by TEI.

The project will then process the text into machine-readable information. Metadata is added to each loanword, including its Greek etymon, meaning, and context, and this allows it to be counted how often the words occur, the manner in which they are used, and to compare across cultures. Lastly, the findings are given in an online digital dictionary. This site will allow people to search through words, sense, or context; it will provide visual aids to indicate cultural localities or borrowing networks. By doing this, the project is transformed out of raw text into an interpretation through the digital means and all three stages of Drucker are covered.