Ricerc@Sapienza

The Project aims to investigate past and present relationships between languages and peoples, contact phenomena and language change in some Iranian speaking areas. The focus will be on a selected range of contact situations, diverse with regard to the degree of contact, and contact-induced changes (a) in Iranian, (b) through contact with Iranian and (c) across Iranian varieties over a period ranging from Achaemenid times to the present.

The primary aim of the project is to explore the morphological and syntactic properties of non-finite verbal forms in certain ancient Indo-European languages. Non-finite verb forms, which include infinitives, participles, verbal adjectives, verbal nouns and gerunds, are “mixed” categories in the sense that they display features and behaviour typical of at least two lexical classes (i.e., the verb, on the one hand, and the noun, adjective or adverb on the other).

The aim of the project is to investigate the formation, transmission and adaptation of medical knowledge and related technical vocabulary through contact linguistic analysis in multilingual and multicultural environments of ancient Eastern societies. The main topics of investigation are the following: 1. The transmission of Indian medicine in Central Asia; 2. The formation of medical knowledge in the Hittite kingdom; 3. Medicine and botany in the Zoroastrian world. These topics give rise to several sub-issues that will be explored through specific sub-projects.

The research group of Rome “La Sapienza” is rethinking a fundamental set of lexical lists, grammars – which are essential to stare at otherwise unattainable linguistic developments through the indirect lens they make available to us. The first line of investigation concerns the Appendix Probi studied as a source for an indirect reconstruction of mainly phonetic developments making inroads in Vulgar Latin.

The research group of Roma Sapienza, PI of a funded national project PRIN 2017, investigates phonological developments suspected or evidenced by heterographs, bi- and tri-lingual texts, lexical borrowings, with regard to Greek for the eastern Mediterranean area and Latin for the southern Mediterranean. Accordingly, the following issues are investigated: