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

Intangible Elements in Material Culture: Writing as a Medium for Cultural Exchange in Late-Archaic Etruria and Latium

Each archaeological object is the bearer of a message from people of the past: however, since an inscribed object was conceived as a message from the beginning, it is able to communicate many intangible elements that would be otherwise lost. In this framework, the author presents some case-studies in Etruscan and Pre-Roman writing with the goal of highlighting the multifaceted cultural aspects that are conveyed by epigraphic documents. The earliest spread of writing offers an unexpected viewpoint on the oral culture relating to the gift-exchange and the ideology of symposium, which were the principal forms of cultural contact in the Orientalizing Mediterranean. Inscriptions are the only direct sources for personal nomenclature, showing the historical development of society as well as the relations with foreigners, from integration to hospitality. Cultic inscriptions found in multi-cultural sacred places - such as harbor and market sanctuaries - offer information on phenomena of religious syncretism, interpretatio and assimilation.

Lexical borrowings in the Latin translations of 1 Corinthians

The influence of Greek on the vocabulary of the Latin translations of the New Testament can be due to various factors, such as the necessity to make up for the absence of specialised Christian terms in Latin and to produce translations as close as possible to the Greek source text. This presentation examines the Greek loan-words and calques attested in the Vetus Latina and Vulgate traditions of the First Letter to the Corinthians. A selection of words derived from Greek will be discussed, with special attention to those unattested outside the Latin Bible and to the semantic areas and grammatical categories to which they can be assigned. It will be also determined whether these forms are equally attested in the manuscripts and in the citations of the Church Fathers transmitting the epistle. Bilingual manuscripts and translations made directly from Greek manuscripts are expected to have the highest number of borrowings because of the close contact with the Greek text. The chronological distribution of the borrowings will be also taken into consideration: it will be observed whether the influence of Greek on the lexicon is more prominent in the earliest translations, when a Latin Christian vocabulary was to be formed, than in the fifth-century Old Latin versions and in the Vulgate or vice versa. The frequency of loan-words and calques also varies according to the geographical provenance of manuscripts and of the early Christian writers that cite the letter: for example, African writers appear to introduce new Latin formations in place of Greek loan-words. Finally, motivations for the inclusion of these borrowings, such as cultural or taboo reasons, will be proposed.

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