The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA) is an Ancient Egyptian virtual dictionary and thesaurus intended to provide a specialist tool for lexicographic research into the Egyptian language. The web application and content is developed at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities with contributions from various sources. Much of the content is in German but help text and some content is also available in English.
The TLA corpus includes Ancient Egyptian writings from the entire historical period from Old Kingdom through to the Greco-Roman period. The majority of the content is concerned with the Egyptian Language as written in hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts but there is also a Demotic database included in the current version.
Features of the website include a browsable version of Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache. [Erman, Adolf (editor), and Herman Grapow (editor)], a digitised slip archive from the Wörterbuch and the Vormanuskript (preliminary manuscript) of the Wörterbuch.
The TLA dictionary itself apparently started with a list of entries from the Wörterbuch by Horst Beinlich (the Beinlich Wordlist). The word list / lemma list has been expanded and developed since then.
The TLA web site went online in 2004 and has undergone various additions and improvements since (the current version is dated October 2014). It remains a work in progress. To access the material you may log in as a guest or register as a user.
The TLA is an invaluable resource for Egyptologists, including a huge volume of material. The database and website designs are very much oriented at specialists. To make the most of the search and research features it is necessary to study the help text and invest some and effort time in finding your way around the site and studying its search functionality.
Hieratic is transcribed as hieroglyphic. TLA uses a subset of the Hieroglyphica sign list for its hieroglyphs, with some additions. A large proportion of hieroglyphs used are already encoded in Unicode. It would be useful to identify those that are not yet encoded so these can be featured in the next update to the Unicode hieroglyph repertoire.
Hieroglyphic writings in TLA are currently implemented as graphics (as with Ramses Online; as outlined in my recent blog entry). As with Ramses, Unicode plain text would open up interesting possibilities for TLA. This should be fairly straightforward to implement in TLA once related work in the Unicode standard is completed.
Bob Richmond
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