Rock-Forming Fe2+-Mg Silicate Solid Solutions

Although the lexicography of the Egyptian language has been under way since nearly two hundred years, this activity has never yielded an inventory of the roots of the language. The roots, abstract elements from which the words or lexemes are derived, differ often from the latter, thus appearing on different places in the alphabetic order of the lexicon: Some stems of Egyptian verbs are derived from their roots by the addition of a prefix, like s-, n-, or m-, and/or by reduplication of the root, as snsn to join, to associate with, as compared with sn, with a similar meaning. The identification of the roots is by no means always an easy task; in many cases it takes both philological and linguistic methods to determine or discern them. Whereas it is important to describe and systematize the mechanics of derivation, further to analyse historical changes of phonetics and writing conventions, the study of the semantics, the development of meaning, is of equal importance. The corpus of the Egyptian language is in constant change. New items may come up whenever a new text is published. With every philological research new meanings and functions or new spellings of existing items may surface. A great collection of lexemes is the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae of the Acadamy of Science in Berlin, which presents online all the items of the big Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache (main volumes accomplished 1931) and all the numerous slips produced for it at that time by an international team of experts of Egyptian texts, but it also keeps track of all later development. There are, however, further lexicographical devices, including the dictionaries of R. Hannig (Old and Middle Kingdoms), of L. Lesko (Late Egyptian), of P. Wilson (Ptolemaic texts), and others. To these should be added the demotic and Coptic dictionaries, for tracing the roots and lexemes into the latest stages of the language. The project Egyptian Root Lexicon shall be executed by the applicant and two younger colleagues. They will be working in the Egyptological Institute of the University of Vienna. The envisaged duration of the project will be 24 months. The resulting lexicon is to be published both as a book and online, in order to facilitate future updating.

Planet Earth, as well as other solid planetary and extraterrestrial bodies, consist to a large degree of crystalline solids, namely minerals. This means that knowledge of the chemical and physical properties of minerals is necessary to obtain an understanding of various processes such as, for example, metamorphism, melting, volcanic eruption and deep earthquake behavior. Such knowledge includes both the microscopic crystal-chemical and the macroscopic physical properties of different rock-forming minerals such as olivine and garnet. Microscopic-scale behavior at the atomistic level determines the macroscopic physical properties of minerals. The role of the former in determining the thermodynamic properties of silicate substitutional solid solutions, for example, is not fully understood. Two key areas need study. The first involves investigating the nature of local structural heterogeneity, which results from the exchange of atoms of different sizes and causes lattice strain. Second, electronic and magnetic behavior arising from transition metals can also affect macroscopic properties. A good scientific understanding of the relationships between crystal-chemical, magnetic and electronic properties and macroscopic physical behavior (e.g., elastic constants, compressibility, thermodynamic functions) is still not at hand. The issues are important for a variety of "applied" scientific questions (e.g., in Geology) and are not just relevant to basic scientific questions regarding the solid state.