About the project

Project Wulfila is a small digital library dedicated to the study of the Gothic language. The primary goal is an online edition of the Gothic Bible and minor fragments, linked to linguistic annotations, interlinear translations and a dictionary. The site also provides facsimiles of some relevant textbooks that are now in the public domain.

The project was hosted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium, from 1999 to 2025, and is currently being transferred to the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (KANTL). For the time being, the site is hosted on a temporary server.

History

The project dates back to late 1996, when two graduates of Ghent University (Tom De Herdt and Steven Van Assche) uploaded fragments of the Gothic Bible to a student web server. The (distant) goal was a lemmatized edition where each word in the text would be a link, inspired by the Perseus project. Though initially limited to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, the site generated some interest and several people kindly offered help in digitizing the text. David Landau and Robert Tannert scanned and edited the greater part of Streitberg's edition, and by the end of 1997 the entire Gothic Bible was available.

In 1999, the website moved to a server at the University of Antwerp (UFSIA at that time). It was redesigned, scanning errors were corrected, and interlinear translations and a simple search engine were added. After that, the main site remained largely unchanged until May 2004.

In 2002, the website became part of a research project granted by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of the University of Antwerp, under the direction of Prof. J. Van Loon (Een gelemmatiseerd, diachroon, elektronisch tekstcorpus van de Germaanse talen, inzonderheid het Nederlands, 2002–2004). The Gothic text was cross-checked with the TITUS version, converted to TEI P4 XML, and automatically lemmatized and POS-tagged using a digital glossary and a formal model of Gothic inflectional morphology. We provided two facsimile editions and began work on the text entry of the Old Saxon Heliand. In May 2004, the website was rewritten from scratch using web standards. More details about the project can be found here or in the final report (in Dutch).

Roadmap

The website is maintained on a volunteer basis, as time allows. Current priorities:

• Verification of automatically generated word analyses.
• Linking the text to facsimile editions of the manuscripts.
• Critical apparatus based on Streitberg's notes and recent readings (Snædal).
• Recently discovered fragments, Bologna etc.
• More Bible translations.

Feel free to get in touch with suggestions!