Dear Wikimedia Commons Discussion List,
I'm writing to offer three preprint academic papers to the Wikimedia Commons archive, as my contribution.
In 2017 the writing system of a manuscript filed as MS408 was revealed to be the only known example of an extinct language known as proto-Romance, as it later evolved into the various modern Romance languages. As such, it has significant value to the field of Romance linguistics and is an important part of the heritage of Romance speaking countries.
Three draft papers are available to freely download from the preprint linguistics website LingBuzz: The first paper explains the writing system and language: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737 The second paper translates a pictorial map from the manuscript: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808 The third paper focuses on volcanological details from the map: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004381
A more comprehensive paper has now been peer-reviewed and will be formally published in a journal in 2019. Regards, Dr. Gerard Cheshire,
University of Bristol.