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.

« … Quia et linguam Punicam scire audieram ». On Latino-Punic or Punic in Latinate guise

The Phoenician alphabet, derived from the Middle Bronze Age Proto-Sinaitic script, was a consonantal linear writing system that, betraying its Egyptian roots, originally only rendered consonants (an abjad), in what is often described as a historical orthography, which renders but little synchronic phonetic information. Later, Western Phoenician, or Punic, would occasionally render final long vowels indiscriminately most often with an ʾAlif. Even later, especially after the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War in 146BC, until at least the first century AD, an unsystematic system of vocalisation was employed, known as phonetic orthography, recycling graphemes whose underlying phonemes had become quiescent. Apparently, Carthage’s destruction and ensuing Roman suzerainty meant that Punic was no longer the exclusive prerogative of a highly trained scribal elite, and was henceforth used informally, as the unsystematic orthography and widely divergent epichoric palaeographies seem to suggest. During this period, we see a fascinating expansion of the use of public and especially private Punic epigraphy, imitating Latinate habits. From the first to at least the fourth century AD in Tripolitania, the Latin alphabet was used to render Punic in a relatively systematic fashion, Latino-Punic (as well as the testimonia of some Latinate African authors such as St Augustine). These texts are thus among the few alphabetic Semitic textual corpora with contemporary vocalisation, which shed interesting light on diachronic and comparative phonetic developments, and also provide a key to understanding neo-Punic vocalised orthography.
This lecture, after a brief historical overview, will focus on the Tripolitanian Latino-Punic corpus, with some reference to neo-Punic. Although in the past, both neo- and Latino-Punic were seen as the last throes of a dying language (or even mistakenly as Berber), here we in reality see a Semitic language continuing to thrive into early Late Antique Roman North Africa, reinvigorated in a sense through contact with Latin. While we see Latin influence in textual genres, formulae, onomasticon, and occasionally syntax, above all the usage of the Latin alphabet sheds important light on diachronic morphophonological questions. We will furthermore explain how the Latin alphabet was adapted to render Punic. While Latino-Punic had but a limited geographical spread and was only used for a relatively brief period, this is counterbalanced by its importance for diachronic Semitic linguistics.

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.

Grapholinguistics as an interdisciplinary framework for the synchronic and diachronic study of writing

Grammatology, graphonomy, graphem(at)ics, writing systems research – many labels exist for a field that emerged in linguistics only towards the second half of the last century. They are by no means synonyms as they stem from different paradigms and research traditions. What they have in common, however, is that they address (different) facets of the topic of writing. These aspects are subsumed under the broad heading of grapholinguistics – a designation that is already well-established in German-language research (as ‘Schriftlinguistik’) and is now gaining traction in the Anglophone world as well. Grapholinguistics is defined as an interdisciplinary field that covers not only descriptive questions concerning the structure of writing but also adopts sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, as well as several other perspectives and methodologies to account for questions of the use of writing (cf. Meletis/Dürscheid 2022). One of the main aims of grapholinguistic research as outlined in Meletis (2020) is the estab-lishment of a framework for the systematic investigation of writing systems, which in a first step entails the proposal of descriptive concepts. Notably, such a framework must be maximally inclu-sive and thus capable of accounting for all writing systems – not just alphabets and not just mod-ern (i.e., living) writing systems. Against this background, a trichotomy of subbranches has been proposed as the core of a comparative descriptive grapholinguistics: (1) graphetics, studying all aspects concerning the materiality of writing; (2) graphematics, examining the linguistic and communicative functions of writing, and (3) orthography, dealing with the normative aspects of writing such as the regulation of written structures. With a combination of concepts from these three subbranches and an acknowledgement of their interaction, a thorough description of various writing systems can be achieved, allowing a comparison and typologization that moves beyond the mere question of which linguistic levels (phoneme, syllable, morpheme, …) their basic units predominantly correspond with (cf. Joyce/Meletis 2021). Furthermore, in enriching the resulting descriptive accounts of writing systems with usage-based perspectives as well as extralinguistic evidence and thus complementing a descriptive theory of writing with an explanatory component, a fuller picture of writing as a structural and commu-nicative phenomenon emerges. This search for explanations can be guided by four categories that assess how ‘well’ writing systems meet different criteria or fulfil given functions: the (I) systematic fit evaluates how systematic a writing system is in and of itself, the (II) linguistic fit asks how well a writing system suits the structure(s) of the language it is used for, the (III) processing fit assesses how well a writing system suits the physiological and cognitive capacities of human readers and writers, and the (IV) sociocultural fit explores whether a writing system fulfils a literate communi-ty’s sociocommunicative and cultural needs and wishes. This talk will give an overview of the mentioned descriptive and explanatory components of grapholinguistics and discuss their implications for both the (re-)assessment of existing research on modern and ancient writing systems as well as the future of their study.

References:
— Joyce, Terry, and Dimitrios Meletis (2021). Alternative criteria for writing system typology. Cross-linguistic observations from the German and Japanese writing systems. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 40.3: 257–77. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2021-2030
— Meletis, Dimitrios (2020). The nature of writing. A theory of grapholinguistics (Grapholinguistics and Its Applications 3). Brest: Fluxus Editions. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-meletis
— Meletis, Dimitrios, and Christa Dürscheid (2022). Writing systems and their use. An overview of grapholinguistics (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 369). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757835

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.

Deciphering Meroitic: how far have we come? How far can we go?

Meroitic was the main language of the successive kingdoms of ancient Sudan. It was however written only during the last of them, the Kingdom of Meroe (270 BC –ad 330). Its two scripts (hieroglyphic and cursive alphasyllabaries), which were derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and demotic, were deciphered in 1911 by F. Ll. Griffith. However, Meroitic belongs to a not-so-rare category of ancient languages that are written in a well-known script but are not or incompletely understood, such as Gaulish, Etruscan, Messapian, Elamite, and many others. As no significant bilingual text was so far discovered, progress in the translation of the Meroitic texts was rather slow in a hundred years. Another reason was the lack of evidence for existing related languages. Scholars such as Griffith himself and his successors Macadam (1909 – 1997), Hintze (1915 – 1993), Millet (1934 – 2004) and Hofmann (1934 – 2016) had to use internal methods of decipherment with contrasted results.
In 2010, the present author provided strong evidence for linking Meroitic to a sub-family of Nilo-Saharan languages, which he termed “Northern East Sudanic”. It comprises four groups of living languages spoken from Chad to Eritrea and significantly includes Nubian, a language family that replaced Meroitic in the Middle Nile valley after the fall of Meroe. This recent discovery gave new impetus to the study of Meroitic. Linguistic comparison with related languages and with the reconstructed proto-language is unfortunately not the ultimate key to the complete decipherment of Meroitic (the related languages are actually not so close), but it proved to be a powerful tool when added to internal methods. Currently, certain categories of texts like the funerary inscriptions can be translated entirely or almost entirely, whereas historical and administrative inscriptions remain in great part obscure, but this obscurity is gradually losing ground.

Participial syntax in the Bible: Greek data compared to Latin translations

This presentation focuses on two usages of the participle in Biblical Greek, which were very rare in previous stages of Greek, and investigates them compared to their translations in Vulgate Latin. The types ἐλθὼν κατῴκησεν and ἦν… διδάσκων illustrate these usages. In the first type, the participle and the main verb form a morphosyntactic unit, i.e. a multiverb construction in which the participle provides deictic and/or aspectual information to the main event. Certain constraints on the participle, namely its belonging to a closed class (verbs of motion and posture) and its position just before the main verb, confirm this analysis. In the second type of construction, conversely, the two verbs do not form any morphosyntactic unit, as the finite verb is an existential-locative predication while the participle functions as the main semantic predication of the clause.
In several studies devoted to these constructions in recent years, attention was paid, on the one hand, to the influence of Semitic languages (Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic) and, on the other hand, to the registers of language in which they were used. In this presentation, I would like to explore the relation between these constructions and some structural aspects of the diachrony of Greek, such as the restructuring of the aspectual system and the differences that emerged in the information structure in Biblical Greek.