How to use TIR

Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum (TIR) has nine content categories, most of which are listed in the uppermost menu in the sidebar on the left. Their mutual interrelations are illustrated in the chart below.

Accessing any page belonging to one of the categories will not only give you all relevant information about the item in question, but also provide links to all immediately related items as depicted in the chart. For example, on an inscription page, you will find links to the characters used and the words written, as well as to the object which bears the inscription. If you continue to one of the word pages, you will find a list of inscriptions in which this word occurs, as well as links to the morphemes and phonemes it contains.

You can find an overview over the items belonging to a certain category via the respective link in the menu to the left, or by clicking on the category’s name at the very bottom of each page. On the category pages, you can find lists of inscriptions, objects, museums, etc., and distribution maps. Another clue to taking full advantage of all the information made available in LexLep is using the property pages. Every item in a category has certain properties, which are listed in tabular form on the respective page. The easiest way of accessing the property page is by clicking on its name, e.g., craftsmanship on an inscription page. The property page contains a list of available values – telling you, in this case, which methods of applying inscriptions were used in Raetic inscriptions –, definitions, maps, and statistics.

There are three additional options in the left-hand side menu.
The concordance lists corresponding inscription sigla in the most important editions (PID, IR, LIR, MLR).

The bibliography displays a complete list of all the literature referred to in TIR. Every entry includes a list of pages for which the reference is used, i.e. every inscription, object or general topic with which the work is concerned. All references cited on pages link to the full bibliography, but a list of used references is given at the bottom of each page separately.

Under the header Raetica, you can find a general introduction to the study of Raetic, including definitions and information about the scope of the database. The list of pages displayed there links to summary texts containing general information on the various aspects of the Raetic corpus, e.g., research history, onomastics, etc. These provide the necessary background for the collected data and can be used to put the latter into context.

For information about transliteration conventions, see Property:character.

The sidebar menu in the second box from above is concerned with navigation and search. The index is useful for finding all pages on which an item is mentioned. The links on the item pages will show only directly related pages, e.g., the page of a morpheme links to all words in which this morpheme occurs, but the index will also list all references to the morpheme in commentaries and in the summary texts. The MediaWiki semantic search for objects and inscriptions can be conducted with the help of forms ("Object query", "Inscription query"). More complex searches can be performed manually via the "Advanced search"-button. The direct Search bar is useful for short-cuts to pages whose precise names are known; it does not perform semantic or in-text searches.