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Chapter 7 - Linguistic Contacts in the Late Byzantine Romances

Where Cultural Influence Meets Language Interference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2018

Adam J. Goldwyn
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University
Ingela Nilsson
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

Under the Palaiologan dynasty, a number of works of Western origin were translated into Greek; the status of these works as evidence of the every-day language of their time has often been disputed. This attitude is perhaps more pronounced in the case of the War of Troy. This work contains a most particular mixture of learned and vernacular elements, a fact which has remained largely ignored by linguists working on the history of Greek. This chapter is concerned primarily with the details of specific morphosyntactic properties of the War of Troy (verbal periphrases, participial forms and analytic adjectival comparatives) and the conclusions it draws are accessible and far-reaching. The paper demonstrates the ways in which the source language (Old French), leaves visible traces at the linguistic level. Old French words, syntactic structures and grammatical forms reveal how Old French and Greek mixed together at the linguistic level, shaping the aesthetics of Late Medieval Greek and changing it in fundamental ways. When thinking about translation across the Middle Ages, moreover, the specific case of the War of Troy can also be understood as a case-study in cross-cultural translation and linguistic hybridity more generally.
Type
Chapter
Information
Reading the Late Byzantine Romance
A Handbook
, pp. 144 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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Kriaras, E. (ed.), Βυζαντινά Ιπποτικά Μυθιστορήματα (Athens 1955), 215–49.Google Scholar
Kriaras, E. (ed.), Βυζαντινά Ιπποτικά Μυθιστορήματα (Athens 1955), 2983.Google Scholar
Agapitos, P. A. (ed.), Ἀφήγησις Λιβίστρου καὶ Ροδάμνης. Κριτική ἔκδοση τῆς διασκευῆς α (Athens 2006).Google Scholar
Lendari, T. (ed.), Ἀφήγησις Λιβίστρου καὶ Ροδάμνης (Livistros and Rhodamne). The Vatican Version (Athens 2007).Google Scholar
Kriaras, E. (ed.), Βυζαντινά Ιπποτικά Μυθιστορήματα (Athens 1955), 141–96.Google Scholar
Papathomopoulos, M. and Jeffreys, E. (eds.), Ο πόλεμος της Τρωάδος – The War of Troy (Athens 1996).Google Scholar

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