L'orizzonte linguistico della Chiesa di Persia: considerazioni preliminari

This paper offers a preliminary survey, here limited to the pre-Islamic age, of the linguistic dimension of the rise and unprecedented missionary expansion in Asia of the Church of the East (also known under the labels of “Church of Persia” and “Nestorian”, a misnomer repudiated by present-day East Syrians), and particularly of the different languages (Greek, Armenian, Middle Persian, Sogdian, Arabic, Late Sabaic, Old Turkic, possibly already Dravidian and Chinese) to which the clergy and followers of this Church were exposed, in a fertile exchange with their own liturgical language, Classical Syriac, and its different spoken Eastern Aramaic counterparts. The different situations obtaining in Mesopotamia, Iran, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia and India are here canvassed, and the relevant phenomena of language contact, particularly of lexical enrichment, for Syriac are here rather cursorily outlined, with a view to providing a first thematic guide to future enquiries.