Veronese riddle
The Verona Riddle ( Italian Indovinello veronese ) is a riddle in Italoromanic in a manuscript in the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona . The text in more recent Roman italics from the 8th or 9th century has sometimes been cited as the oldest example of a text in Italian since it was discovered and published by Luigi Schiaparelli in 1924.
text
- Diplomatic transcription
- 1. ✝ separebabouesalbaprataliaaraba & albouersorioteneba & negrosemen
- 2. seminaba
- 3. ✝ gratiastibiagimusomnip (oten) ssempiterned (eu) s
- Transcription
- Se pareba boves
- alba pratalia araba
- albo versorio teneba
- negro semen seminaba
- Gratias tibi agimus omnipotens sempiterne deus
- German translation
- He prepared cattle
- He plowed white fields
- He held a white plow
- He sowed black seeds
- We thank you, O almighty eternal God
Explanation
The language of the text is an Italo-Romansh spoken in the early Middle Ages . The interpretation of the text, which was written without punctuation and word separation, is problematic at the beginning: Here it is unclear whether se goes back to Latin sibi or Latin sic and whether pareba points to Latin parare or Latin parere . The remaining words are less of a problem. The versorio (reversible plow), which goes back to vulgar Latin * versorium , corresponds to the dialect word versor in modern dialects of the Veneto .
In the absence of comparative texts, one can only speculate about the more precise temporal and spatial allocation of the text. The text could have been written in Verona around the year 800 by a monk who knew Latin. It is not related to the rest of the manuscript.
The text forms a scribe's riddle : it is the scribe's hand that plowed white fields (blank pages), held the white plow (the goose feather) and sowed black seeds (letters). The incomprehensible beginning can refer to the scribe's fingers or the cowhide parchment.
literature
- Andreas Michel: Introduction to Italian Linguistics , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-025254-5 , chap. 2.5.2.1 The Verona riddle. P. 44f. Online .