What languages do the archive documents speak?
The documents stored in our archive do not all speak the same language, but mainly Italian to a lesser extent. In which and how many languages do the archive sources therefore speak?
Documents are produced in a specific historical and geographical context and the way in which the source is written and edited, its intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics also depend on them.
This is why we cannot expect sources to speak exclusively Italian, not what we know and speak.
Most ecclesiastical archival sources, thus also those of the Society, were written in Latin, especially official documents and, depending on the geographical area and era, also personal ones such as correspondence.
Latin in the West, and also in the Catholic missions, was the most widely used and understood language, a bit like English today.
This is not the articulate Latin of Cicero or Seneca, as over the centuries many linguistic constructs were used less and less, in favour of simpler grammatical structures, as in medieval Latin.
For many personal correspondence, home diaries or other sources, we also find Italian, an Italian with grammatical characteristics different from ours, a lexicon more obsolete than that of today.
For example, in the sources it is normal to find the words ‘lo spedale’ instead of ‘l’ospedale’, or ‘et’ for ‘e’ or dialectal terms especially to indicate food.
The use of the vernacular language, progressively replacing Latin, did not occur for all the historical Provinces of the Society of Jesus at the same time.
In the documents of the two northern provinces, for example, it is more frequent to find official documents written in Italian, while in Rome, the last city of the Papal State and seat of the Roman Curia, the ecclesiastical tradition is stronger and the use of Latin will resist for longer, even well after the Second Vatican Council, which will prescribe the use of Italian instead of Latin for masses and the daily life of the religious. The historie domus of some Roman communities continue to be written in Latin even into the 1980s.
Our documents, however, are not only divided between Latin and Italian speakers, although obviously these are the two largest macro groups.
There are a number of documents written in Albanian, Spanish and Portuguese, in French and English by foreign Jesuit correspondents, and, especially when missionaries died, the obituary and the news were communicated in the local language.
There is also a smaller number of documents that speak ancient Greek and, in at least one case, modern Greek. College students and novices studied Greek, in addition to Latin and other subjects, and often had to produce small poems to prove what they had learned. Some of these poems have survived and come down to us.
For the document composed in modern Greek, we refer to the specific in-depth study we dedicated to it.
The photo shows poems and dedications in Albanian by the students of the Shkodra College for their professor Fr Giuseppe Marini on the occasion of his fiftieth anniversary, and some notes on a mathematical expression.
In our archive, there are also a few documents in Hebrew, again almost always school compositions.
Some fathers devoted themselves, during recreational moments, to composing sonnets and verses in dialect, so it is possible to appreciate some Venetian or Neapolitan inflections in these particular documents.
Maria Macchi
