Histoire Épistémologie Langage (Dec 2024)
Chœroboscus, source de Bar Bahlūl : une hypothèse à l’épreuve
Abstract
The 10th-century Lexicon Syriacum by Bar Bahlūl contains several thousand Greek words transliterated into Syriac and translated into Arabic. Among these forms, drawn from various sources of the Greek tradition, there are hundreds of conjugated verbs which, according to a thesis presented by Nikolaï Serikoff in a 2018 article, could originate, directly or indirectly, from the Epimerisms of the Psalter, a Greek grammar manual composed in the 9th century by George Choeroboscus, a professor at the University of Constantinople. In this manual, Choeroboscus provides a comprehensive grammatical analysis of each word in the Psalter. This article aims to shed some light on this unusual grammar treatise, which has few equivalents in ancient grammatical literature, yet seems to have played an essential role in the Western school tradition right up to the end of the Byzantine Middle Ages. Secondly, a detailed examination of the two texts will be employed to assess the veracity of Serikoff’s hypothesis, which, in itself, offers valuable insights into the interconnectivity between the Greek and Syro-Arabic traditions.
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