Lecture: Keynote: Entzifferung und linguistische Erschließung des Kaukasisch-Albanischen / Decipherment and Linguistic Disclosure of Caucasian Albanian
Jost Gippert
Among the many manuscripts that were found in a hidden cellar room in St Catherine's monastery on Mt Sinai in 1975, there were two that contained, as palimpsests, in their lower layers texts written in an unknown language and script. In the course of scientific work that began in the 1990s, a group of scholars was able to decipher the given script and to identify the language in question: the palimpsested materials turned out to represent biblical texts written in the language and script of the so-called Caucasian "Albanians", a people of the south-eastern Caucasus that was Christianized, together with Armenians and Georgians, in about the 4th century of our era and developed an independent ("autocephalous") Church until the region was conquered by the Arabs. The keynote tries to retrace the decipherment of the script and the disclosure of the grammar and lexicon of the language, which can be shown to be a close relative, if not an ancestor, of modern Udi, thus representing the only East Caucasian language with a documented diachrony.
Info
Day:
2023-05-26
Start time:
17:00
Duration:
01:00
Room:
SKW B
Links:
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