Lingua letteraria e lingua di corte: diglossia e insegnamento tradizionale in Etiopia fra Tardo Antico e Medio Evo

The Ethiopian literary tradition extends over a time frame beginning even before the christianization of the Country (first half of the 4th cent.) up to modern times. In this long period we frequently register phenomena of interference both among different languages (Greek, Gǝ‘ǝz, Arabic, Amharic, agaw languages and so on) and between various registers of the same language, produced or conditioned by specific cultural or religious contexts. Particularly, in the Middle Ages the differentiation between Gǝ‘ǝz as the language of the clergy and the written discourse, and Amharic as the language of the court and the verbal communication, had momentous reflexes on the traditional teaching, related to Gǝ‘ǝz liturgical texts, but orally transmitted in Amharic. This development proved to be crucial for the start of the literarization process of Amharic, to be dated back to the second half of the 16th cent., as an effect of the missionary propaganda of the Portuguese Jesuits and of their polemics against the Ethiopian Orthodox clergy.