Medieval and Early Modern Judaeo-Greek biblical translations: A linguistic perspective

Abstract

Linguistic approaches to Medieval and Modern biblical Judaeo-GreekWorks by Greek-speaking Jews in the Middle Ages and early modern period only gradually caught the attention of linguistic scholarship. The material spans the period from the Arab conquest to the early twentieth century, when traditional (as opposed to western-styled individual) translations were still produced in the Romaniote communities. No major non-religious Greek texts by Byzantine Jews were known at the beginning of the twentieth century other than the few Judaeo-Greek glosses and liturgical fragments. The only exception was the Constantinopolitan Pentateuch (CP), a fully fledged translation of the Torah printed in 1547. A complete transcription into Greek letters, published by Hesseling in 1897, attracted immediate attention.Late nineteenth-century linguistics was dominated by the neogrammarian perception of phonetics as the only strict scientific inquiry, and therefore the only firm footing for linguistics. In this respect the Hebrew script afforded advantages for investigating medieval phonetics. In the spirit of his age, Hesseling viewed the CP as a sui generis phonetic recording expressed via the Hebrew alphabet, and a faithful representation of ‘la langue commune de la fin du moyen age’ or ‘κοινή de Constantinople’. For him, and contemporaries such as Belléli, the phonetic precision of CP confirmed it was an ‘authentic spoken language’. Proponents of demotics admired such features as μιά pronounced as [mnja], or the reduction of the unstressed augment to [i] and [o] > [u].