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Teacher
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CIGNI Costanza
(syllabus)
Course presentation
This module provides both an historical and cultural framework of the Germanic tribes in the Middle Ages and a synchronic description of the Common Germanic and its later linguistic developments, with particular regard to the early varieties of West Germanic (Old English and Old High German dialects). It also offers an introduction to the philological and linguistic analysis of the earliest Germanic texts and to useful operational tools in this field of study.
Lesson plan
First part
Germanic Philology: subject, method and field of application; the comparative method in historical linguistics; Germanic and concept of proto-language reconstruction; trees vs waves: two models of language diversification; phonological and morphological development from Indo-European to Proto-Germanic and to medieval Germanic languages; linguistic interference: Germanic-Romans contacts in Antiquity and in the Early Middle Ages; Germanic tribes and writing.
Second part
Practical comparative-contrastive analysis of some Lord’s Prayer versions in Gothic, Old English and Old High German.
(reference books)
For the theoretical background of the discipline, a textbook to be chosen from:
-S. Leonardi – E. Morlicchio, La filologia germanica e le lingue moderne, il Mulino, Bologna 2009
otherwise:
-N. Francovich Onesti, Filologia germanica. Lingue e culture dei germani antichi, Carocci, Roma 2002 (rist. 2015).
For the origins of written literatures:
-M. Battaglia, Medioevo volgare germanico, Unipress, Pisa 2016 (2a edizione rivista e ampliata).
-Moreover, it is required to study all the supporting materials of lectures available on the learning platform (UniTus moodle).
N.B .: non-attending students will prepare independently the same programme as attending students including the supporting materials of lectures.
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