In the Early Modern period, the most common way to provide a sample of a foreign language was a translation of the Lord's Prayer, also known as Pater Noster or Oratio Dominica. Multiple books were released containing translations of Pater Noster into many languages (up to 100 and even more), and travel reports often contained translations of Pater Noster into the languages of the lands the author traveled to.
While many of those translations are in well-known languages and are not interesting from the linguistic point of view, and others are badly corrupted or sometimes even made up, there are quite a few which represent the earliest written attestations of the corresponding languages, or demonstrate unique features of extinct dialects. And while some of those texts have been subject to detailed historical and linguistic analysis, others don't seem to have attracted the attention they deserve. The phenomenon of those collections as a whole doesn't seem to be well-researched either.
The collections have a complicated textual history. Collectors of Pater Noster translations copy texts from each other, often specifying their sources (sometimes incorrectly), and often introducing errors in the process of copying. The languages of each translation are also sometimes misidentified.
The goal of this project is to create a database of the Pater Noster translations published in collections that came out before the early 19th century. For each translation, this database aims to:
- identify the language;
- track down the original source wherever possible;
- specify the transmission history;
- annotate the differences between the versions of the same translation published by different authors;
- provide interlinear glosses;
- provide links to articles where a given translation is discussed or analyzed.
The effort is currently actively in progress.
- Differences between different versions of a translation are annotated as footnotes.
- Differences in punctuation and diacritics are not annotated.
- Punctuation is normalized so that every petition is a new sentence.
- A text in a non-Latin script and its transliteration are presented as two different specimens. The transliteration is marked as 'based on' the original text.
- Differences between transliterations of the same text are not annotated; only one version is selected as canonical.
- Purely graphical differences ('i' vs. 'j', 'u' vs. 'v', 'w' vs 'vv', 'ss' vs 'ß') are not annotated.
- Glosses are provided only when they are present in an original attestation.
The references covering individual books or texts are provided in the pages for these books or texts. The following references cover the phenomenon of Lord's Prayer collections in general:
- Schmidt-Riese, Roland (2003): Ordnung nach Babylon. Frühzeitliche Spracheninventare in Frankreich und Deutschland. In: Sammeln, Ordnen, Veranschaulichen: Zum Wissenskompilatorik in der Frühen Neuzeit. Frank Büttner, Markus Friedrich, Helmut Zedelmaier (eds.) Lit Verlag Münster
- Trabant, Jürgen (1998): Mithridates: De Gesner jusqu'à Adelung et Vater. In: Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, No. 51, pp. 95-111.
This repository contains the database of the specimens themselves (the data directory),
as well as code to generate a public Web site from the database.
If you want to add something to the database or to correct an error, you're very much welcome to file an issue or a pull request.