Altre scritture

Nella storia linguistica italiana sono attestate due tradizioni allografiche principali: il greco-romanzo (sardo e varietà italoromanze, specie del Meridione estremo, scritti in caratteri greci) e il giudeo-italiano (volgari e italiano in scrittura ebraica). Il saggio descrive entrambe le tradizioni relativamente ai corpora testuali e alle modalità della transcritturazione. Per ciascuna tradizione, infine, si fornisce uno specime testuale provvisto di un'introduzione.

Allography is a general term that refers to the practice of writing one language in the script of another language, because of historical and cultural circumstances. All through the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, Italian vernaculars have been written in both Greek and Hebrew characters by, respectively, the Greek communities of Southern Italy and the Jewish communities scattered across the peninsula. Sporadic uses of the Arabic and Syriac scripts for Italo-Romance varieties are also attested, for reasons that still need to be explained. The allographic corpus includes significant documents for Italian linguistic history, such as the earliest written records of Sicilian, Calabrian, and Salentino dialects. Some of the texts are quite relevant for the history of Italian literature, as is the case for the poetic fragments in Greek characters of the ms. Laur. Plut. 57.36, witnessing to the spread of court love poetry in Salento, and the well-known Judeo-Italian elegy, anthologized by Contini in his “Poeti del Duecento”. Texts in non-Latin scripts also display recurrent textual strategies, discourse traditions, formulaic expressions, translation techniques (in the case of volgarizzamenti). The study of these elements can provide decisive clues to define the cultural contexts in which our texts were written.