The Aliento project focuses on medieval sapiential texts translated and circulated in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages between the 9th and the 15th centuries.
Our basic unit of study is the Brief Sapiential Statement, a global denomination which includes proverbs, sentences, maxims, sayings, aphorisms, apophthegmata…, and whose definition is: every statement (from one word up to two or three sentences) presented as a unit containing a lesson, an advice, a moral, a judgment (moral or social)
The Aliento project intends to show how Brief Sapiential Statements (BSS from now on) of ancient origin were shared and exchanged between 3 religious cultures and 5 languages in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages (9th – 15th c.). We have chosen a minimal corpus given their well-known relationship in order to develop a methodology of annotations and a tool allowing to cross these texts and establish links between the BSS, regardless of the language used in the original text. Textual medieval treatises are written in Latin, Arabic, Castilian, Hebrew and Catalan.
The database objective is to build a model of efficient description transferable to other similar corpus, making it possible to compare the BSS of every sapiential text (ancient, medieval, modern or contemporary) with the other texts of the database.
