Il September-Testament nell'officina di Adam Petri

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the first reprint by Adam Petri, a printer in Basel, of Luther’s September-Testament, published in Wittenberg in 1522. The essential aim of the work is to compare the reprint with the original, in order to highlight the chief variations. The paper introduces the results drawn from a close analysis of the two texts. The linguistic phenomena regarded as the most important ones will be taken into consideration, with particular reference to those of phonological and graphematic kind, and a fair number of examples will be given. Therefore, the phenomena of diphthongization, monothongization, metaphony, vowel lengthening as well as of apocope will be analysed, with the necessary considerations of graphematic kind. Such phenomena are considered by linguists as fundamental both for the formation of a first nucleus of Modern German and for the development of written German from the Middle High German period to the New High German one. The results of the comparison will enable us to make some remarks about the degree of diffusion of the over-dialect features of the Lutheran language as well as more general observations about the development of the German language at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, some aspects regarding morphology and word-formation will be the subject of a narrower analysis. Lastly, some occurrences of lexical variation will be introduced, which have resulted from the comparison of the two texts and which pre-announce the glossary attached by Adam Petri to the edition following the reprint, published some months later.