Speaker: Valentina Calzolari, University of Geneva
2022-10-26In this session, our speakers will introduce and discuss a transdisciplinary research project: “Philological Practices: A Comparative Historical Lexicon”. It is directed towards the preparation of a large one-volume lexicon. This lexicon will present the most important terms that philologists have used to describe their activities in Classical traditions throughout the world and throughout history. It would make it possible to compare with one another the procedures involved in order to establish similarities and differences. It will provide an enormously valuable basis for interdisciplinary and intercultural communication. It will illuminate dimensions of philology as a social practice within scholarly, epistemological, educational, and institutional contexts. The lexicon will be organized in terms of the languages of these traditions from the actor's perspective; within each language, articles will define the terms (or will note their absence) for the central philological agents, practices, materials, genres, and institutions, and will explain their usage, history, and complexities. Full cross-references will make it easy to establish comparisons across cultures. Covering about twenty philological cultures and providing articles for an average of twenty-five philological terms for each tradition, the Lexicon will contain about five hundred articles at an average length of one page per article plus substantial introductions to each particular area.
2022-10-17Zoroastrian rituals are still performed in an Old Iranian language, Avestan. Their composition began in the second millennium BCE and was concluded by the middle of the 1st. Existing texts of Avesta were written down likely around the 6th century by people speaking Middle Persian, a South-Western Iranian language with a completely different phonological and morphological system. A series of tools were developed for the care and oral preservation of these texts. They partly resemble the ones we find in India for the transmission of the Vedic texts, including techniques for the memorization of the texts (with emphasis in the correct recitation), also for their analysis (e.g. resolution of the synalephas, repetition of the preverbs in tmesis, etc.) and understanding. The invention of the Avestan script (likely around the 6th century) was turning point in the history of the transmission of the Avestan. The number of letters of the Avestan script (at least 54) reveals that the main interest was to create a script that can reproduce the correct recitation of the Avestan texts including very specific phonetic nuances without phonological relevance. The invention of the Avestan script did not put an end to the traditional oral transmission that have survived until modern times, but inaugurated an own scribal tradition (inheriting many traces form the Aramaic one). The oldest extant manuscript go back to the late 13th century and most copies were produced in the 17th century.
2022-09-25