Latin Word-forms from the Beginnings until the Twentieth
Century.
The Thesaurus Formarum (TF-CILF) allows the user to
observe the variety of uoces latinae from the beginnings of
Latin literature to the present, across periods, centuries, authors and
works.
An immense body of texts - which today comprises almost 63 million
word-forms - beginning with Plautus and coming right to the present day
offers the researcher an insight into the whole development of Western
culture. Researchers can achieve rapid and reliable responses to
questions on the history of Latin vocabulary from Antiquity through the
Early Church period and the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the present
day.
This 'treasure-trove for the Latin language' brings together
huge numbers of word-forms and attestations which a conventional
dictionary could not provide. It fills in the gaps in dictionaries,
corrects their errors, and even supplies new word-forms. For the first
time a reference to the century concerned is provided for each
attestation of a word.
Each attestation can be observed in a supplementary printed volume,
the four columns of which present the frequencies according to the four
principal chronological periods (Antiquity - the period of the Church
Fathers - the Middle Ages - the Neo-Latin period): single occurences of
words and gaps easily spring to light. This allows comparative analyses
to be undertaken.
In several respects the Thesaurus Formarum (TF-CILF)
is the reference tool par excellence with regard to a study of
Latin vocabulary. It is a reliable starting-point for carrying out
research on text-editions and dictionaries, to study etymological or
semantic questions in any of the languages - Romance, Germanic and
other - that were influenced by Latin. The database therefore has an
application in the historical study of European languages and can have
a teaching as well as a research function.
The Thesaurus Formarum enables searching to be done both on
normalised word-forms and all the different written historical forms
included in this index of latin forms.