Tecniche di traduzione

Da Troxel, R. L. (2008). LXX – Isaiah as Translation and Interpretation. Leiden: Brill: p. 73 «what is often called “translation technique” merely describes the effects of the translator’s work rather than “the system used by the translator”».

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Alignment Change in Iranian Languages

In short

The book is a study over ergativity in Iranian languages. The phenomenon is described by the author in these terms: “the morphosyntax associated with past transitive verbs differs from that associated with all other verbs in the language concerned”.

Alignment is here meant as “a cover term encompassing labels such as ergative, accusative, active etc.” (Introduction, p. 6).

Haig gives an account of the phenomenon both in a diachronic and in a comparative perspective, focusing more specifically on the Western branch of the Iranian group.

As the author explains in the Introduction, the two main issues addressed in the work are 1. why such a drift has taken place in Iranian languages; and 2. how the various dialects of the family have re-organized their systems accordingly, giving rise to a number of different hybrid constructions: “A second major aim of this book, then, is to investigate the array of non-accusative alignments found in past transitive constructions in Iranian with the aim of reconstructing the pathways down which they have progressed, and identifying the underlying principles that guided their developments” (Introduction, p.1).

Haig decides to approach the problem from a perspective that innovates, with respect to the previous studies on the matter, both in the sample taken into account and in the basic hypothesis that guides his analysis. In stead of limiting his analysis to a general sketch, as has been done in the previous studies of Iranian ergativity, Haig decides to investigate in dept a quite vast range of Iranian varieties, throughout a wide lapse of time: Old Iranian (mostly Old Persian ), Western Middle Iranian (Middle Persian, Parthian), Modern Iranian (Persian, Kurdish, Balochi, etc.).

Moreover, the hypothesis suggested by Haig, for the origins of the ergative constructions, differs heavily from the traditional one, that related them to the type librum lectum mihi (est) : “I argue at length against the theory that ergative alignments emerged from an agented passive construction. An alternative proposal is formulated, according to which ergativity emerged through the extension of a pre-existing non-canonical subject construction” (Introduction, p. 3).

Margherita Farina

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