Call for papers: 2nd Tamilex ConferenceWords & What They Mean

10 February 2025

Photo: Roland Ferenczi

École françaie d'Extrême-Orient / Institut français de Pondichéry

The 2^nd Tamilex conference will take place in Pondicherry, 10–14 February 2025. The first part will consist of a three-day workshop for volunteers – with intensive training in text encoding and in manuscript transcription. The second part will be two days of invited presentations. The keynote speech will be presented by Y. Subbarayalu & G. Vijayavenugopal, on their work creating a dictionary of Tamil epigraphy. Following that, there will be four half-day panels on different topics. After two years of intensive lexicographical work, we intend to take a step back in order to have a good long look at what has been achieved and at the things that ought to be achieved within the Tamilex project and beyond: 

Panel 1: Lexicography

The first panel will deal with lexicography — the study of dictionaries and the science of compiling them. It will also give room to other dictionary projects besides Tamilex, such as those that deal with the language of epigraphy and with mixed languages like Maṇipravāḷam.  

Panel 2: Rare words

The second panel will deal with rare words, a phenomenon that we have been constantly confronted with when reading any genre of Classical Tamil. What are the strategies for dealing with words that occur only rarely, and then often with different meanings, if we believe the commentators? How do commentators arrive at their meanings? Are the “meanings” given by commentators precise meanings or are they sometimes clues towards getting at a meaning? How helpful is context? What is the value of later parallel passages? How reliable is the intuition of a native speaker? Is it preferable to put a question mark instead of a barely justifiable interpretation?

Panel 3: Corpus semantics

The third panel will deal with the vocabulary of particular texts. Do single texts have distinctive lexical peculiarities? How can they be explained? Should they be considered as a poet’s idiosyncratic use of the language? Can we find groups of texts whose vocabularies are related (beyond the fact that they belong to a common domain)? Can the same observations be confirmed with respect to different commentators?

Panel 4: Open panel

The fourth panel will be open in particular to scholars who seek to link up with the work of Tamilex. It is meant to be an occasion for them to present their own work and/or ideas of what they would like to do.

To any panel we welcome presentations that make use of digital humanities to answer related questions.

This is an open call for papers (title and abstract up to 300 words), to be submitted until the end of November 2024. Each presentation will be scheduled for approximately 25 minutes, with an additional 15 minutes for discussion. Please send your proposals to charles.li"AT"uni-hamburg.de.