Contemporary Voices in Ancient Tongue: Integrating Papal Encyclicals into the LiLa KB

This paper presents the integration of a new textual resource—the Papal Encyclicals corpus—into the LiLa: Linking Latin Knowledge Base. The inclusion of three recent Encyclicals authored by Pope Francis (Lumen Fidei, Laudato si’, and Fratres omnes) significantly enriches the LiLa Knowledge Base by extending its chronological coverage and introducing contemporary Latin vocabulary. The linking process involved automatic tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, and lemmatisation using the LiLa Text Linker, followed by manual validation and disambiguation. The newly added lemmas fall into three categories: Latinized anthroponyms and toponyms, ethnic adjectives, and neologisms. These lexical additions reflect both a modernising trend in Vatican Latin and diverse morphological and semantic processes, including borrowing, calquing, and analogy-based reconstruction. The resource also opens avenues for analysing the stylistic and rhetorical features of Papal Encyclicals as a genre.