Le ottave 'esotiche' del "Ciriffo Calvaneo". Un «viaggio ai confini ultimi della lingua»

In the fourth part of the Ciriffo calvaneo, a chivalric poem composed by the Pulci brothers in the 1470s, two octaves are written in ‘Oriental’ languages, in order to reproduce the conversation between Aleandrina, princess of Troy, and Tibaldo, king of the Moors. As already shown by Cardona, Aleandrina’s speech is in Turkish and represents one of the earliest records of this language in Western literature. On the contrary, Tibaldo’s reply is not in Arabic, as claimed by the author (probably Luigi Pulci), and is instead a very well-conceived parody of Semitic, mixing real Arabic words with Arabic-shaped nonsense sequences, Hebrew, Greek and even Italian terms.