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Swiss Academy of Human and Social Sciences
The Swiss Academy of Human and Social Sciences / l'Académie Suisse des Sciences Humaines et Sociales / die Schweizerische Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften is represented by Dr. Beat Immenhauser, General Secretary of the SAHSS.
The SAHSS supports various long-term research projects. They form the backbone of research in the humanities and social sciences and make a substantial contribution to the preservation, dissemination and enhancement of Switzerland's collective memory.
Long-term projects and their ensuing resources
Overview of SAGW projects
Ortsnamen.ch / Toponymes.ch
The project ortsnamen.ch/toponymes.ch researches and provides information about place names in Switzerland. Ortsnamen.ch/toponymes.ch is also an information platform for current events and publications in the context of Swiss and international toponymy. The portal ensures:
- the continuous backup of research data from ongoing and completed projects
- the publication of this data in an online database
- the georeferencing of place name data via various online map systems
- the maintenance of an ongoing bibliography on Swiss place name research linked to electronic resources
- own research activities on a small scale oriented towards data collection and presentation
Ortsnamen.ch/topnymes.ch is a data repository for searching Swiss place names and visualising them on maps. It functions since 2001 and it is set up and maintained by the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, under the aegis of the SAHSS.
Swiss Text Corpus
The project Swiss Text Corpus / Schweizer Text Corpus is devoted to the standard German language of Switzerland in the 20th and 21st centuries. The digital collection is structured according to formal, content-related and chronological criteria and comprises well over 20 million text words. It is a balanced representation of the Swiss German vocabulary and can serve as a basis for specifically Swiss lexicographical questions. The text corpus will be enriched with further texts from the 21st century by 2025. Access to the corpus is given through its search interface. The Swiss text corpus relies heavily on collaboration and open standards in order to be able to use the best possible technologies for its purposes. Open standards are indispensable in text and corpus technology so that sustainably available resources can be provided. Like many other corpora, the Swiss text corpus encodes the XML versions of its documents according to the specifications of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The scans with deposited text are preserved as archivable PDFs. The Swiss text corpus has been maintained by the Schweizerisches Idiotikon since 2014, under the aegis of the SAHSS.
The National Dictionaries of Switzerland
Since 1996, the SAHSS has been responsible for the National Dictionaries. A specially appointed commission (members) is responsible for the scientific and scientific-political supervision.
Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande
Vocabolario die dialetti della Svizzera italiana
Medieval Latin Dictionary
The Medieval Latin Dictionary (MLW) deals with Latin texts that were written between 500 and 1280 in the German-speaking world and are available in edited form. The Medieval Latin Dictionary is the largest of 20 national dictionaries on medieval Latin that are being compiled under the aegis of the Union Académique Internationale (UAI) in Europe (see also Medieval Latin Dictionary Projects). The basis of the MLW is the Zettelarchiv with about 1.5 million slips of paper for about two million entries from almost 4000 texts. The MLW is compiled in Munich at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities by an international team. The Thesaurus is available in printed and online.
Thesaurus linguae Latinae
The Thesaurus linguae Latinae is the first comprehensive dictionary of ancient Latin. It is compiled on the basis of all surviving Latin texts from antiquity (up to 600 AD), both literary and non-literary. For rarer words, it offers all collected evidence, for the others (marked with an asteriscus) an instructive, representative selection. It lists all meanings and all constructions, it documents peculiarities of inflection, spelling and prosody, and it provides information on the etymology of Latin words and their survival in the Romance languages (renowned representatives of Indo-Germanic and Romance studies are responsible for this). The Thesaurus thus offers a comprehensive, richly documented account of the possibilities and history of each Latin word - not only for Latinists, but also for scholars of classical studies in the various fields as well as for neighbouring disciplines. The basis of the dictionary is the Zettelarchiv with around 10 million slips of paper. It is being compiled in Munich at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities by an international team. The thesaurus is available in printed and online.
Historical Dictionary of Switzerland
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HLS) is a scientifically compiled, networked, up-to-date and multimedia specialist encyclopaedia on Swiss history. It sees itself both as a reliable research infrastructure for the scientific community and as a comprehensive and attractive information service for the general public. Its (identical) contents are offered in the three national languages German, French and Italian. The HLS counters the inevitable “ageing process” of the contents by monitoring, the results of which are incorporated into the lexicon within the framework of its resources in an update controlled by criteria. As a national encyclopaedia on Swiss history, the HLS is committed to multilingualism in its organisation and services. The HLS consciously tries to use the interaction and application of various media such as text, images, film, sound and infographics as carriers of content to convey information. The foundation and starting point of the online version are the more than 36,000 articles of the print edition (published from 2002 to 2014). These are constantly being thematically expanded, conceptually renewed, consistently linked and adapted to the multimedia requirements of the new medium. At the same time, thanks to close cooperation with the research community and consistent orientation towards the latest research, the lexicon corpus is being systematically supplemented.
Swiss German Dialect Corpus / Schweizerdeutsches Mundartkorpus
The Swiss German Dialect Corpus (CHMK) documents the Alemannic dialects of Switzerland from the 19th to the 21st centuries and supports the continuation of the Swiss Idiotikon dictionary. Since 2019, hundreds of dialect literature works have been digitized and texts from the internet collected, resulting in a corpus that now includes over 30 million words from more than 2,900 sources. The CHMK, available in XML format for research purposes, contains texts representing identifiable Swiss German dialects written after 1800. It is continuously being expanded and will soon include corpus linguistic annotations such as normalization, lemmatization, and part-of-speech tagging.
Linguistic atlas of German-speaking Switzerland / Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz
The Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS) is an epochal work from the last century. The eight-volume atlas documents the Alemannic dialects of German-speaking Switzerland, including the Walser dialects of northern Italy, on over 1500 language maps. The maps are based on oral surveys conducted between 1939 and 1958. The website www.sprachatlas.ch makes the map volumes and the original material (questionnaire and response material) digitally accessible. It also processes the materials by linking them, connecting individual words with the Swiss Idiotikon, and presenting the maps additionally in a new form as colored area maps. Currently, this site features 508 digitized maps, around 1,750 scanned atlas pages, and approximately 174,000 pages of original material, of which more than 53,000 pages are in shorthand transcription.