Rosa Bianca Finazzi

Recently, in the Archive of San Petronio in Bologna, a palimpsest bifolium has been found out: the upper script contains St Augustine, De civitate Dei, in half-uncial; the lower script is Gothic, apparently written in Northern Italy. The Gothic lower script offers some passages translated into Gothic from the Old and the New Testament, which are up to now unknown and not handed down by the existing Gothic manuscript tradition. The Gothic text of the fragment has been transcribed; an Italian translation has been added. An in-depth linguistic and philological analysis is provided about the script, its origins and date, followed by the examination of the identified biblical passages being compared with the Greek and the Latin versions in order to highlight concurrences and divergences. This kind of analysis has casted new light on some traits of the Gothic language and its vocabulary bringing out terms that were not so far attested and rare terms as well.

Il fitonimo aiηatundi “roveto, spine”, impiegato nella Bibbia gotica per tradurre b£toj, è stato oggetto in passato di ricostruzioni etimologiche basate su aiηa- ‘cavallo’ e -tundi ‘dente’. Si propone qui di ricondurlo, seguendo l’interpretazione di tund- come derivato dalla radice germanica indicante l’idea di ‘bruciare’, alla pratica del debbio, pratica che è presente in diverse civiltà anche non indoeuropee dalla preistoria fino a tempi recenti e che sembra essere stata in alcune tradizioni letterarie anche un topos poetico.