Fratture e interferenze: filologia e linguistica della tradizione testuale etiopica (uno sguardo retrospettivo sulla ricerca degli ultimi decenni)

The Ethiopian textual tradition is marked by interferences since its earliest phase and along its whole history. Within this tradition, the creation and transmission of the Ethiopic (Gǝʿǝz) corpus is also marked by gaps in the material transmission (extremely few manuscripts from late antiquity up to the thirteenth century are extant), and in the textual transmission as well, with a Greek-based phase in late antiquity and an Arabic-based phase since the medieval period. The acquisition of new manuscript witnesses and textual evidence to the Ethiopian (and Eritrean) tradition through extensive field researches and microfilming and digitisation campaigns during the last five and particularly the last two decades, require reconsidering the correlation of philological and linguistic evidence in the light of the plurality of linguistic standards and varieties that are attested in the course of time.