Greco e latino a confronto: soluzioni per la presentazione del materiale linguistico nel lessico di Prisciano

In the Greek-Latin lexicon at the end of his Ars grammatica Priscian displays a number of somehow fixed expressions to introduce the Latin syntactical con- structions that he compares to the Greek ones. It is possible to recognize the constant value of the most frequent of such expressions. The clarity of locutions introducing Latin lemmata and quotations gives us the possibility to under- stand the different kinds of linguistic similarities between Greek lemmata and Latin equivalents and thus to also showcase the different levels of the struc- ture of Priscian’s glossary. They range from simple verbal translations of Greek lemmata or quotations, to actual Latin lemmata that were meant to adhere to the Greek ones both in meaning and syntax, to additional lemmata within the same language whose mention is due to semantic or syntactical similarities. The same values of these lexicographical expressions can find corresponding parallels in the other books of the Ars, albeit the proportion of their frequency varies greatly from the glossary to the remaining books. In a perspective which takes into account the incompleteness of Priscian’s lexicon it is possible to iden- tify different typologies of voices, corresponding to as many different levels of completeness of the glossary. In the second section of my paper I examine the issue of literal translations of Greek lemmata into Latin, trying to draw a distinction between mere literal versions and expressions meant to be real Latin lemmata in correspondance to the Greek ones. The first criterion followed in this analysis is the evaluation of linguistic propriety of Latin constructions. A Latin expression, which may prove syntactically incorrect, is surely just a word-by-word translation of the Greek syntagm. If instead the Latin construction is linguistically proper, the presence or absence of further elements within a voice of the lexicon, such as additional grammatial remarks or literary quotations, alongside the simple Latin translation, can demonstrate that Priscian actually intended such a syn- tagm to be a Latin equivalent of the Greek lemmata. In the last section of the paper I give some examples of semantically improp- er verbal translations and I try to justify the awkward lexical choices of the grammarian-translator by comparison with the Latin version of Greek words in other Late Antique bilingual glossaries edited in the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, a comparison which can prove decisive in at least one case (GL III 360, 15-16).

Lo studio delle espressioni fisse con cui Prisciano introduce i confronti tra costruzioni greche e latine nel suo lessico sintattico bilingue consente di riconoscere una serie di modelli di articolazione delle varie voci del lessico corrispondenti ad altrettanti diversi stadi di avanzamento della loro elaborazione. La seconda parte del contributo verte su alcuni casi di traduzioni letterali dal greco al latino compiute da Prisciano che pongono particolari problemi linguistici ed esegetici.