Faculty Member, ...
"Marie Curie" Fellow
Thesis Title: Sulaymān Ibn Ḥasan al-Ġazzī vescovo palestinese di Gaza (X-XI sec.): per una nuova edizione critica di alcuni trattati teologici
About
The project for a new critical edition of Sulaymān al-Ġazzī’s theological treatises arises primarily from the need to apply the rules of modern philology, but also, and no less important, the desire to provide linguistics scholars with useful material to reconstruct the history of the Arabic language in the Middle Ages.
During my extended stay in Syria and Lebanon (2004 - 2005) I was able to take photos of the manuscript sources of al-Gazzi’s theological treatises, in order to prepare a new critical edition. It therefore became necessary to learn about issues relating to Arabic of the manuscript. The situation of diglossia, or multiglossia, present in modern Arabic, brings together the ancient language and the standard classical literature on one hand and the language of the modern media and the local dialects of disparate parts of the Arab world on the other. This stratification is necessarily complex, and a fortiori, in medieval MSS. where alterations in the original text give rise to phenomena closely linked to the problems of the copy and the language of the copied model. This has been termed Middle (or Mixed) Arabic by specialists (Blau 1966-67; Lentin 1997).
The admixture and combination in the manuscripts of linguistic elements belonging both to the literary and the spoken language has raised the problem of classifying this mixed language. In Arabic linguistics, specialists often try to explain this phenomenon using the continuum model, the range between dialects and standard varieties.
A major aim of the research is therefore to preserve and highlight the language features I have observed in the sources, adopting the hypothesis that these do not contain a text written in an “incorrect” form, but that they are precious evidence of the specific age and provenance of the code, as well the date and provenance of both copy and copyist. The need to reconstruct the text as closely as possible to the author’s language forces the editor to pay attention to this kind of data. Since I had not decided a priori on reconstruction, I paid particular attention to the most reliable accounts, using criteria developed and honed in Romance philology.
