Sulle rotte linguistiche dei genovesi d’Oltremare: prime analisi di un corpus di atti rogati in latino a Chio nel XIV secolo

[Machine translation] This contribution illustrates some linguistic — and, largely, historical-cultural — aspects that emerge from notarial Latin texts linked to the colonies of Chios and Cyprus, established by the Genoese overseas who crossed the Levant Mediterranean between the 14th and 15th centuries. The analysis focuses in particular on a corpus of acts written to Chio by Raffaele de Casanova and Giuliano de Canella and to Cipro by Lamberto di Sambuceto. Through these texts, we will investigate some specific aspects of the multilingual landscape of the medieval Mediterranean, a highly mobile and interconnected historical-cultural area, of which the sea represents, according to Braudel, “the greatest existing document of his past life”, which has long attracted the interest of linguists interested in events of interlinguistic contact, in the development of frank and commercial languages and in fluid, multilingual and multigraphic repertoires (see, for example, Orioles & Toso 2008, Molinelli 2015, Di Salvo & Muru 2016). In this context, the Genoese played a fundamental role through the construction of overseas economic activities that led to the development of linguistic settlements and islands, real “other Genova”, as defined by Toso (2020:31)., Specifically, a corpus of notarial deeds drawn up in Latin but heralding interesting random emergencies due to the sociolinguistic context of both Chios and Cyprus, characterized by a strong mistilingualism (Greek, Latin, romance varieties, including Hebrew: see, for example, Argenti 1958, Pistarino 1995:434 on Chios) will be examined. The study presented here is part of a larger project aimed at exploring the effects generated by contact and linguistic interference in the macro-geo-documentary area of Mare Nostrum, and aims to add a piece to the linguistic characterization of the figure of the Genoese notary in the era of his greatest “prestige and power” (Costamagna 1970; see also Olcati 1994).