IL DIALETTO DEGLI SHINTE ROSENGRE: ESAME DELLE FONTI E ANALISI DELLA MORFOLOGIA TRA SINCRONIA E DIACRONIA

The discovery of Shinto Rosengro brings about new data to the panorama of old settlement Romani varieties in Italy. Discovered by Leonardo Piasere in the early 90s’ and partly published in 2001, the manuscripts witnessing this Neo-Indo-Aryan dialect were arranged from 1892 to 1911. The author, Sigismondo Caccini, was a man who had a strict contact with the community of Shinte Rosengre and took part to its short-range movements through Central Italy. The wide corpus of texts and grammatical descriptions by Caccini consists of six grammars, eighteen tales and four dictionaries counting about four thousand terms. It shows a Sinti variety carrying some peculiar features, which distinguish it from the other old settlement varieties on the Italian ground (Sinti and Abruzzian Romani). This work aims to the description of the morphology of Shinto Rosengro, and to the discussion and possible explanation of some of its peculiarities. It is divided in three main parts. In the first part, a description of the morphology of the word classes of Shinto Rosengro is given (the described classes are: noun, article, adjective, personal pronoun, possessives, demonstratives and verb). Every chapter of this first part is divided into two sections: the first section presents and, if possible, accounts for the forms given by the grammarian Caccini, and shows the evolution of his description; the second section offers a description of the morphology extracted by the texts in Shinto Rosengro, that are considered as the most proximate example of what had to be the actual use of this language. The second part is a collection of five chapters that focus on some peculiar morphological traits of Shinto Rosengro, in order to offer a possible explanation for their genesis. The topics are: the dative/locative syncretism in the noun inflection; the imperfect marker -esta; the periphrastic future built with avra particle; the participle in -men; the abstract derivatives in -ipen/-iben and their distribution. The third part gives a synthetic analysis of some features of Shinto Rosengro, which are presented in relation to the main diagnostic isoglosses proposed by scholars up to now for the classification of Romani dialects. This part focuses especially on the relation of Shinto Rosengro with the geographically nearest old settlement varieties. As a final appendix, the transcription and translation of some unpublished tales of Caccini corpus is proposed.