CHANGE    PRIN Progetto di ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale        Contact and History in Ancient Grammar of Europe

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The Siena Research Unit endeavours to study Biblical translation into Latin: Jerome’s Vulgate and the number of pre-vulgate versions which are collectively known as Vetus Latina. These texts are compared to both the Greek version and – in the case of the Old Testament – to the Hebrew text.

A special focus is on Biblical Greek, which has the potential to provide a privileged viewpoint on language contact phenomena, as it stands in the rather peculiar position of being both a source-language (even though Jerome also used Hebrew texts) and a target-language (as it was the language adopted by the Seventy translators of the Old Testaement).

Our research is concerned with morphological, syntactic (and morpho-syntactic), and lexical aspects of these languages, in relation to both the internal evolution of these languages and the contact-induced phenomena that are due to translation processes. For instance, some of our studies concern the translation strategies of Greek participles and infinitives into Latin, the translation of verbal forms which are diathetically marked, complementation strategies, the expansion of dative and genitive, and the Wortbildung processes that come about because of the re-interpretation of Greek forms.

The analysis of Biblical Latin and Greek in their role as translation languages sheds new light on morpho-syntactic issues which are not easy to frame within the individual linguistic systems, but which are clearly understandable as contact phenomena that have occurred along with the translation processes.