HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

The course is part of the Master Degree in Italian Literature and Philology.
The course aims to supply students with advanced competences in the linguistic analysis of written texts, both old and modern, and their historical and cultural contextualization. The achievement of this objective will enable students to apply autonomously the methods and tools of historical linguistics, discourse analysis and stylistics to texts of the past and Contemporary Era, both literary and non-literary.

1. Knowledge and comprehension:
1.1 Understanding the difference between multigraphism, biscriptality and allography, and of the socio-linguistic contexts at their origin.
1.2 Knowledge of the textual traditions and specific texts written in Medieval and Modern Italian by using scripts other than the Latin alphabet.
1.3 Understanding how Italian is written in scripts other than the Latin alphabet.
1.4 Understanding the difference between edition, transliteration and critical-interpretative transcription of allographic texts.
2. Ability to apply knowledge and understanding:
2.1 Ability to distinguish between the historical and linguistic features of the different allographic traditions in the Italo-Romance context.
2.2 Ability to recognise the main problems in the edition and linguistic analysis of allographic texts.
2.3 Ability to apply the acquired knowledges to the analysis of a specific allographic text.
3. Judgement ability:
3.1 Ability to critically evaluate the choices of editors of allographic texts.
3.2 Ability to critically evaluate the interpretation of problematic spellings, in Greek and Hebrew characters, of Italo-Romance words.
3.3 Ability to compare the texts written in Greek and Hebrew characters with the coeval documents in Latin alphabet (as far as the textual typology and the contexts of production/reception are concerned).
4. Communication skills:
4.1 Ability to communicate in appropriate technical language the historical, material and linguistic features of the allographic texts in the Italo-Romance context.
5. Learning skills:
5.1 Know how to critically study reference texts, hierarchizing information and establishing connections between various notions.

Students must have achieved the formative objectives of History of the Italian language I and II (or Italian Linguistics I and II).
As stated in the section "Contenuti", although the course deals with the scripts of Italian other than the Latin alphabet, students are not required to know the Greek and the Hebrew alphabets.

Title of the course: The other scripts of Italian.
We are all used to associating the Italian language with the Latin alphabet, ie. the script by which Italian and the Italo-Romance dialects have been commonly represented since their origins. Nevertheless, Italian vernaculars (and, in some cases, even literary Italian) have been written also in scripts other than the Latin alphabet, especially between the 14th and the 16th centuries, such as the Greek, the Hebrew and, in single texts, even the Arabic, the Armenian, the Ethiopic and the Syriac scripts. The phenomenon of writing one language in the script of another language is called “allography”. It is interesting not only for its linguistic implications (ie. the relation between the phonemes of Italian and the signs of scripts conceived for other languages), but also for the socio-linguistic and cultural contexts at its origin, as well as for the historical importance of the allographic documents: The earliest records of Sicilian and Salentino are written respectively in Greek and Hebrew characters. Moreover, allographic texts may have literary value, as in the case of the so-called Judeo-Italian Elegy, included by Contini in his anthology of Italian poets of the 13th century.
The course will first concentrate on general issues concerning the very peculiar type of linguistic contact represented by allography. Then it will consider the main problems regarding allographic texts in Italian vernaculars and literary Italian. In the second part of the course, a selection of texts will be read in Roman transcription and analyzed (as a result, it is not necessary to know any script other than the Latin alphabet in order to attend the lessons). The analysis of texts (or parts of texts) will help to understand the main features of the allographic documents and the challenges faced by scholars in providing their editions and studying their language.

Daniele Baglioni, Altre scritture, in Giuseppe Antonelli, Matteo Motolese, Lorenzo Tomasin (a cura di), Storia dell’italiano scritto, vol. VI. Pratiche di scrittura, Roma, Carocci, 2021, pp. 81-124.
Daniele Baglioni, Olga Tribulato, Contatti di lingue – Contatti di scritture: considerazioni introduttive, in Daniele Baglioni, Olga Tribulato (a cura di), Contatti di lingue – Contatti di scritture. Multilinguismo e multigrafismo dal Vicino Oriente Antico alla Cina contemporanea, Venezia, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2015: 9-37.
Angela Basile, Repertorio dei testi romanzi in caratteri greci dell’Italia meridionale e della Sicilia (secc. XIII-XVI), «Medioevo letterario d’Italia», IX, 2013, pp. 49-88.
Alessandro De Angelis, La transcritturazione del romanzo in caratteri greci, «Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani», XXVII, 2016, pp. 175-200.
Marco Maggiore, Sui testi romanzi medievali in grafia greca come fonte di informazione linguistica, «Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie», CXXXIII/2, 2017, pp. 313-341.
Aaron D. Rubin, Judeo-Italian, in: Aaron D. Rubin/Lily Kahn (eds.), Handbook of Jewish languages, Leiden, Brill, 2016, pp. 297-364.

The texts will be available on Moodle, together with further material concerning the texts that will be read during the lessons.

Students will have to pass an oral exam of 20-30 minutes. During the exam, students will demonstrate their knowledge of the subjects that have been illustrated in the lessons and that are described in the reference texts.

oral

The lecturer has a duty to ensure that the rules regarding the authenticity and originality of exam tests and papers are respected. Therefore, if there is suspicion of irregular conduct, an additional assessment may be conducted, which could differ from the original exam description.

28-30L: the student masters the topics presented in the course and in the assigned readings; he is capable of hyerarchizing information and makes use of a convenient scientific terminology;
26-27: the student has a good knowledge of the topics presented in the course and - to a lesser extent - in the assigned readings; he generally succeeds in hyerarchizing information and is familiar with scientific terminology;
24-25: the student does not always know thoroughly topics presented in the course and in the assigned readings; his oral exposition is clear, although concepts are not always expressed through a convenient scientific terminology;
22-23: the student has a mostly superficial knowledge of the topics presented in the course and in the assigned readings; his oral exposition is not always clear and generally lacks scientific terminology;
18-21: the student has a very superficial knowledge of the topics presented in the course and in the assigned readings; his oral exposition is confused and does not resort to scientific terminology.

Frontal teaching. All materials read and commented upon during the lessons will be available in the e-learning platform moodle.unive.it. Students will be invited, on a voluntary basis, to present allographic texts, as far as both their philological aspects and their linguistic features are concerned.