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

Between Septuagint and Vulgate: the order of words in Biblical Greek and Latin

The comparison of the Greek texts of the Old and New Testament with the Vulgate version allows us to obtain important grammatical information from both the Greek text and the Latin text (see, e.g. Villa 1999). In the case of the Greek text, the Latin version offers us a direct testimony of the way it was understood already in Antiquity thorough the testimony of individuals who, in most cases, knew the two languages well. In the case of the Latin text, the basis of the analysis consists in the fact that the Latin version of the Vulgate aims, at the same time, to be as literal as possible, and to render a text written within the correct linguistic norms of Latin (see e.g. Brock 1979). The most interesting information comes, therefore, from those cases where there is a divergence between the Greek text and the Latin text, since this divergence gives us insight into the limits of Latin grammaticality. In this paper, I analyze those passages in which there is a variation in word order between the Greek text of the Septuagint and the Vulgate, mainly in Genesis. As I argued in Villa (2000), in such passages it is possible to find regular patterns that correspond to differences in the Greek and Latin systems of word order.

References:
— Brock, Sebastian (1979). ‘Aspects of translation technique in Antiquity’: Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 20: 69–87.
— de la Villa, Jesús (1999). ‘Algunas construcciones gramaticales y no gramaticales en latín tardío’. In: H. Petersmann & R. Kettemann (Hgg.). Latin vulgaire – latin tardif. Actes du Ve Colloque international sur le latin vulgaire et tardif. Heidelberg, 5–8 septembre 1997. Heidelberg: Carl Winter: 287–298.
— De la Villa, Jesús (2000). ‘El orden de palabras de algunos determinantes en la Vulgata y en la obra de Jerónimo’. In: B. García Hernández (ed.). Latín vulgar y tardío. Homenaje a Veiko Väänänen (1905–1997). Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas 2000: 221–237.

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.

The Carian Alphabet of Egypt and Related Issues

Carian is unique among first-millennium Anatolian alphabets based on Greek in having a spectrum of local Carian alphabets plus a unified one from Egypt differing from all of them. Further, it shows an apparent “metakharakterismos” in that most letters resembling those of Greek have sound values strikingly different from Greek. Ignasi-Xavier Adiego in his magisterial handbook of 2007 claimed that the Egyptian alphabet is closest to a Carian ‘Uralphabet’ because inter alia it had extra letters for semivowels that were lost in the later forms of the Carian alphabets. I will show that the second claim is false and the first at best misleading. Adiego’s account of the “metakharakterismos” is basically correct, but the diversity of Carian alphabets surely played a role in enabling the process.

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.

Bibliography:
— Bergren, Theodore A. (2019) ‘Greek Loan-words in the Vulgate New Testament and the Latin Apostolic Fathers’. Traditio 74, 1–25.\\- Burton, Philip (2000) The Old Latin Gospels. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — Fröhlich, Uwe (1995) Vetus Latina. Die Reste der altlateinischen Bibel. Epistula ad Corinthios I. VL 22. Freiburg: Herder.
— Garcia de la Fuente, Olegario. 1994. Latín bíblico y latín cristiano. Madrid: Editorial CEES.
— Houghton, H.A.G. (2016) The Latin New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— Houghton, H.A.G., Kreinecker C.M., MacLachlan R.F. and Smith C.J. (2018) The Principal Pauline Epistles: A Collation of Old Latin Witnesses. New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents 59. Leiden: Brill.
— Mohrmann, Christine (1950) ‘Les emprunts grecs dans la latinité chrétienne.’ Vigiliae Christianae 4, 193–211.
— Rönsch, Hermann (1875) Itala und Vulgata. 2nd edition. Marburg: N.G. Elwert.
— Vineis, Edoardo (1974) Studio sulla lingua dell’Itala. Pisa: Pacini.