Sailing through Words. Maritime Technical Terminology from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

The workshop examines the formation and usage of naval terminology and technical language connected to maritime activities across time and between different regions of the Ancient and Medieval world. We wish to compare the specialised languages of seafaring, shipbuilding, naval administration, warfare, and commerce across periods and regions, from the Aegean Bronze Age to the medieval Baltic and beyond. We aim to ask which processes govern the formation and transmission of these languages, and what role they played for the communities that developed them, offering, in doing so, the first systematic, comparative typology of maritime technical languages, and bringing papyrology, epigraphy, linguistics, philology, and the history of technology into a dialogue that has so far remained fragmented across disciplinary and period-specific boundaries. Appel à contribution, Trèves (54296).