«Lingua franca notarile bizantina» in Etiopia? Su un tratto linguistico nel più antico testo documentario etiopico (le costruzioni del tipo ʾǝmfalaga falagu, «lungo il fiume»)

The « Donation of Ṭanṭawǝdǝm » is the oldest Ethiopian documentary text (twelfth century) and has a linguistic feature (type ʾǝmfalaga falagu, lit. « from the river of his river », certainly meaning « along the river » as recently proposed by Nafisa Valieva) that is not found in later texts. Constructions with lexeme repetition in boundary clauses closely resemble the reduplication type found in documentary texts from the Norman and Swabian periods, attested from the end of the eleventh century in southern Italy and particularly in Sicily, in an identical documentary context. For the latter, it has been suggested that the construction, originally from the Greek area, converged into a Byzantine notarial lingua franca, used by Greek-speaking scribes and expressed in Arabic, Greek and Latin documents. The formal and functional correspondence of the linguistic construction justifies the working hypothesis of a direct relationship between Ethiopian chancery and Mediterranean diplomatic practices of the twelfth century.