Lecture | Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars
Quantitative graphemic approaches to runic digitization and classification
- Date
- Friday 2 October 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.20
Abstract
The origin and evolution of Europe’s runic alphabets, used mainly for early forms of Germanic, remain matters of ongoing research. However, despite a corpus of approximately seven thousand inscriptions, the cataloguing and analysis of runes and their variants are still largely manual, making research slow and its results difficult to reproduce. In addition, graphical documentation is generally not standardized, with variation in orientation, stroke thickness and scale hampering large-scale computational analysis. To address these issues, I have designed the new tool 'Carve'. Besides standardized digitization and normalization of runic signs, Carve enables large-scale quantitative analysis, including similarity networks, automated subclustering and pairwise cluster comparison. These methods promote the reproducibility of graphemic research and the testability of older typological classifications, thus aiding the epigraphy of Germanic and potentially also other Indo-European languages.