pa-ro, da-mo. Studying the Mycenaean Case System through DAMOS (Database of Mycenaean at Oslo)

Abstract

DAMOS is an electronic database containing all the published Mycenaean texts, together with rich metadata and epigraphic and linguistic annotation. It was born as a tool to allow for a corpus linguistic study of the case system and the expression of case functions and grammatical relations in Mycenaean, a question central in Mycenaean linguistics with implications for the general history of the Greek language. During the work with the creation of the database, though, it quickly became clear that it could, if made available online and developed in the right direction, become a more broadly useful and versatile instrument for scholars (specialists and not) and teachers, and for dissemination in general. This has, thus, become the idea that informs the work with DAMOS. The main objectives of DAMOS can be summarized as follows: - offer online, and freely accessible, a constantly updated version of the Linear B texts - offer a fexible tool for the palaeographic and linguistic analysis of Mycenaean (for the present author, with a special focus on its case system) - facilitate the access to the Mycenaean material for non-specialists by creating different “entry points” (translations, maps, etc.) to the world of the Linear B documents. - contribute to better integrate Mycenaean scholarship within the rest of classical scholarship, not least by the inclution of Mycenaean data into major digital resources in the feld.