Volume 139, Issue 2

We present ALMA, a new research project aimed at investigating the interaction between language and knowledge practices from AD 1100 to 1500. Our primary question is how Medieval Italian, French, Occitan, Catalan, and Spanish developed into languages of knowledge and scholarship (German Wissen(schafts)sprachen ) in permanent opposition to and exchange with the predominant Latin (but also with Arab, Greek, and Hebrew). Focusing on two domains, medicine and law, the project combines linguistics, text philology, and the history of science with the Digital Humanities and ontology engineering. ALMA will create two multi-lingual, domain-specific text corpora by integrating text editions of hitherto unedited manuscripts and incunabula, and digitized printed editions. Our corpus-linguistic exploration of the ALMA corpora will provide the basis for lexical-semantic studies that analyze emerging knowledge networks and the depth of their linguistic representations. We hypothesize that language evolution and the development of more complex linguistic structures will allow for measuring the impact of knowledge practices on medieval vernacular languages. We will trace the dissemination of lexical material across languages, language varieties, cultural spaces, and periods. This will enable us to follow specific vernacular communication channels. We will use cutting-edge technologies to compile, publish, and share our findings, and to model them in the form of historicized ontologies and Linked Data. Our onomasiological, ontology-driven approach will result in the creation of domain models that can be re-used within the Semantic Web. This has great potential to be relevant for researchers from different disciplines.

In Gascon, Latin ‑ ll ‑ has evolved to the word‑medial result ‑r ‑ and the secondarily word‑final result ‑t in most of Gascony, along with word‑final palatal variants. These results are generally assumed to have originated from a lost retroflex stage, paralleling existing retroflex results for ‑ ll ‑ in South Italian dialects and in Western Asturias. The present study offers an alternative theory by positing a delateralization of a lateral to a voiced non‑spirant alveolar stop * d , with no change in the point of articulation. The * d is shown to be an areal phenomenon in that it is the source of the Upper Aragonese ‑ ll ‑ results and is a sound that is found currently in some Basque dialects. The same theory of a non­spirant alveolar * d stage for ‑ ll ‑ explains the eventual presence of retroflexion in Western Asturias. While on the surface any Basque influence on the Gascon sound changes appears unlikely, this study shows that both the initial change to an alveolar stop, and the word‑final palatal results, can plausibly be attributed to Basque influence.

Judeo-Spanish presents some surprising results as regards the secondary evolution of the diphthong /ˈue/. Contrary to Spanish jueves ‘Thursday’, tuerto ‘one-eyed’, sueño ‘dream’, nuera ‘daughter-in-law’, Judeo-Spanish has ĵugüeves , tugüerto , (e)sfueño , and elmuera . That is, /ˈue/ has evolved either into /u.ˈgue/, it has developed a fricative before the diphthong (/ˈsue/ > /s.ˈfue/), or labialized the previous nasal (/ˈnue/ > /ˈmue/).In this study we present an explanation for this phenomenon that combines the regular Ibero-Romance phonic evolution and some language-specific features of the evolution of Judeo-Spanish, without an explicit appeal to exceptional solutions. Our hypothesis is based on the realization of the sequence /ˈue/ as a hiatus ( ĵu.e.ves , tu.er.to , su.e.ño , nu.e.ra ) which eventually developed an epenthetic consonant. This epenthesis was velar ( ĵugueves , tuguerto ), the latter case also involving further vowel insertion in agreement with the historical phonetics of Judeo-Spanish ( ĵugüeves , tugüerto ). Examples with labial fricatives or nasals preceding the diphthong have followed this evolution and then lost the pretonic vowel, giving way to a consonantal cluster in which the second consonant is partially assimilated to the first ( sueño > * s(u)güeño > sfueño or esfueño ; nuera > n(u)güera > * enmuera > elmuera , ermuera > muera ).

Llibre de paraules e dits de savis e filòsofs , by Barcelona-born Jewish translator and physician Jafudà Bonsenyor, is one of the most representative European thirteenth-century proverbial compilations from the Greco-Eastern tradition. The text, written in Catalan at the request of King James II, coincides with a period of socioeconomic upheavals endured by the Jewish communities of that time. This article seeks to examine Jafudà’s book from a perspective other than as it was originally conceived, i.e., as a manual of human conduct. I argue that embedded in the work is an implicit message beyond the parameters of the text itself. The thematic division and the aphorisms selection in the Llibre convey a subtext that mirrors economic constraints, the decline of Jewish courtiers, religious coercion, and communal frictions borne by the Jewish communities of Catalonia-Aragon. The confluence of these factors acted to redefine the relationship between the Crown and the Jews throughout the rest of the century.

The present research addresses the nominative case systems of the Galician personal pronouns and shows the possibilities that the mapping of linguistic zones based on a system of elements opens up for Galician dialectology. The territory occupied by the different linguistic convergences and their contextualization in the Galician-Portuguese dialectal continuum are also investigated. In addition to the most relevant bibliography, data from the ALGa (Galician linguistic atlas) were used for the analysis of Galician as a whole, and surveys and recordings were implemented to study the particularities of Galician in the municipality of Castrelo do Val and the region of Verín. The convergences detected do not match the three linguistic blocks proposed by Galician dialectology. The nominative case system of the personal pronoun of the Irian diocese is the most commonly used but its use is not as large as the Western Block. The second largest system is the Auriense, but it is less than half the size of the Central Block. The other systems detected occupy smaller areas than the two already mentioned. Among them, we can find the system used in the municipality of Castrelo do Val and the prototypical form from Verín, which only departs from the main system of the Galician-Portuguese continuum in the use of el instead of ele and in the pronunciation of ela with a close-mid front vowel.

In this article I investigate the diachronic path of the Portuguese verb achar ‘to find/consider’, from a main propositional verb (in the sense of Traugott 1989), in earlier stages of the language, to a verb with epistemic reading, which is the default interpretation in Contemporary European Portuguese (CEP). Based on a sample corpus of texts comprehended between the 13th and the 17th century, I have concluded that the epistemic reading of achar was incipient until the 16th century, despite the existence of a few examples in the 13th century. This grammaticalization process seems to be recent in the language since epistemic readings remain infrequent until the 17th century and I did not find parenthetical uses in the corpus. Nevertheless, data under analysis allowed me to identify two possible syntactic contexts that may have favoured the semantic change: complement clauses and transitive-predicative constructions. The evolution of achar ‘to find/consider’ seems to follow the pattern of semantic change proposed by Traugott (1989) and Traugott/Dasher (2002) under the notion of subjectification , with achar starting with an objective meaning and later acquiring an epistemic reading, following the assumption that meanings tend to become centered in the subjective belief or attitude of the speaker.

The Giornali of the saddler Giuliano Passaro, completed around 1526, have not yet received the attention they deserve. The chronicle, which describes in the Neapolitan vernacular the historical situation of the Realm of Naples, is of considerable interest both from a historiographical and historical-linguistic point of view. Up to now, the printed edition of 1785 has mainly been used for historiographical and linguistic research. However, it presents considerable differences and errors with respect to the manuscripts. A critical edition therefore remains an urgent need. In the present state of our knowledge, the ms. 13324 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España seems to be the closest version to the lost original.

Romance texts dating from the beginning of the 17th century are relatively rare in South Tyrol, but also in the Ladin valleys of Badia and Gardena, because the administration of these two valleys preferred to use German. The few examples of the use of Romance in the Ladin valleys therefore deserve special attention: on the one hand, because they allow conclusions to be drawn on the degree of multilingualism at the time; on the other hand, because their linguistic form is sometimes characterised by code-mixing, which manifests itself in particular in the fact that the formulaic parts of the texts are generally in (Northern) Italian, while the specifically content-related parts are often interspersed with Ladinisms. Such a text, more precisely the translation of the statutes of the jurisdiction of Enneberg (Marebbe) made in 1614 by the then chancellor Caspar d’Alfarëi from the original version codified in German in 1566, is edited here for the first time and analysed and commented on from a historical and linguistic point of view.

The author examines the thesis expressed in the title of the volume by Matteo Motolese «L’eccezione fa la regola» . Sette storie di errori che raccontano l’italiano (Milano, Garzanti 2022), and especially the notions of «exception» and «error». In the light of the notion of «error», considered as «a usage condemned, generated by a contrasting rule [R-2]», versus a usage approved and generated by a canonical rule [R-1], the author analyses the examples of errors detected by Motolese in the linguistic history of the 7th–8th centuries ( Appendix Probi ), of the 13th century ( Canzoniere Laurenziano ), of 1501 (Petrarca, Le cose volgari ), 1603 ( Vocabolario della Crusca ), 1840 (Alessandro Manzoni, Promessi sposi , ed. Quarantana), 1939 (the linguistic policy of Fascism) and 2022 (grammar/spell checkers).