Ineffabilis Deus” (1854) Translated: Presentation of a Parallel Corpus and Analysis of 19Th Century Ibero-Romance Varieties
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The papal bull “Ineffabilis Deus” (1854) translated: presentation of a parallel corpus and analysis of 19th century Ibero-Romance varieties Johannes Kabatek (University of Zurich) Keywords: Parallel corpus, minority languages, Ibero-Romance, standardization, 19th century. In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the bull “Ineffabilis Deus” about the immaculate conception of the virgin Mary, a Latin document of theological and philosophical argumentation with an extension of 4476 tokens in the original version. During the following years, the French priest Marie-Dominique Siré collected translations of the text into the languages of the world. He compiled more than 300 translations, among which 55 into European languages and varieties. Several of these languages did not count on elaborated written traditions in the 19th century, so that in these cases the text is a pioneering piece of elaborated prose. The whole collection of manuscripts was donated by Siré to the Pope and has been part of the Vatican library for more than 150 years without ever having been studied linguistically. The contribution will consist in a) the presentation of the project of an online parallel corpus of the text of the bull. This corpus will be built up step-by step, starting with European languages and varieties. It will allow access to annotated transcriptions of the text as well as to the digitized original documents. The first step to be presented will consist of 20 European languages and varieties. b) the presentation of four versions of the text in order to show how the corpus may be used for linguistic analysis. I will choose the Ibero-Romance varieties Catalan (Central Catalan as well as Catalan from Mallorca), Asturian and Galician. In all four cases, the traditions of written prose in the 19 century at the moment when the bull is translated are scarce. Only in one of the four cases, the Asturian translation, the community of speakers becomes aware of the existence of the text, whereas in the other cases the translations remain unknown. I will analyse four dimensions of the texts (orthography, morphological unity, lexical variety and clause linkage) in. In all of these fields, the translations show a surprising degree of standardization: the orthography appears as rather systematic, morphology as rather unified, the lexicon offers a high degree of diversity and the clause-linking techniques show a wide range of aggregative as well as integrative techniques (Kabatek/Obrist/Vincis 2010). On the other hand, the corpus allows for interlinguistic comparison of features of the respective languages in their diachronic state of the mid 19th century. I will compare some morphosyntactic features (clitic positions, differential object marking and possessive constructions) in order to show the potential of analysis the parallel corpus offers. References: Busto, Xuan Carlos (2002), “Presencia de la llingua asturiana fuera d’Asturies en colecciones documentales ya obres impreses (sieglu XIX)”, Revista de Filoloxía Asturiana 2, 97- 154. Duval-Arnould, Louis (2002), “La collection “Sire” de la Bibliothèque vaticane”, en: AA.VV., Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae IX: 115-168. Ferrando i Francés, Antoni / Amorós, Miquel Nicolás (2011), Historia de la llengua catalana, Barcelona, Editorial UOC. Hannesschläger, Ingonda (1998), “Übersetzungen der Bulle Ineffabilis Deus”, en: AA. VV., Meisterwerke Europäischer Kunst. 1200 Jahre Erzbistum Salzburg 138: 235-237. Kabatek, Johannes / Obrist, Philipp / Vincis, Valentina (2010), “Clause-linkage techniques as a symptom of discourse traditions: methodological issues and evidence from Romance languages”, in: Heidrun Dorgeloh / Anja Wanner (eds.): Syntactic Variation and Genre, Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 247-275. Raible, Wolfgang (2001), “Linking clauses”, en: Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher y Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language typology and Language Universals/ Sprachtypologie und sprachliche Universalien/ La typologie des langues et les universaux linguistiques – An International Handbook/ Ein internationales Handbuch/ Manuel international, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter: 590–617. Siré, Marie-Dominique (1866), “Traduzione in tutte le lingue della Bolla Ineffabilis, colla quale Sua Santità il Papa Pio IX proclamò domma di fede l’Immacolata Concezione di Maria santissima”, in La Civiltà Cattolica, 17/7/IV, 729-737. Solà, Joan, et al. (2008), Gramàtica del català contemporani, Barcelona, Editorial Empúries, Vol 1. .