Scripts Beyond Borders: A Survey of Allographic Traditions in the Euro-Mediterranean World

This collection of essays deals with the phenomenon of allography, taken

in the sense of the practice of writing a language in the script of

another language. Although by no means all texts highlighted in the

essays are of a religious character, they are written in the scripts

that are connected with the three monotheistic traditions stemming from

the Eastern Mediterranean: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The time

span covered ranges from Late Antiquity to (early) modern times.

The volume contains studies on such cases as Aljamiado (Romance

languages of Spain written in Arabic or Hebrew script but also Bosnian

in Arabic script), Judaeo-Arabic, karshuni (Arabic but

occasionally also other languages written in Syriac script), and various

combinations of languages written in the Greek, Syriac, Armenian and

Georgian scripts. In each case, the approach is both philological,

concentrating on the various systems of adaptation of the scripts to the

phonetics of the languages in question, and historical, with a focus on

aspects of intercultural contact and exchange, as well as on the

emergence and development of the various allographic traditions over

time. Particularly important questions, discussed in several

contributions, are whether specific communities used scripts of a

language other than their own for practical or rather for ideological,

identity-related considerations, and how these writing practices relate

to the sociocultural contexts in which they functioned and developed.