 So we are very happy to welcome Christina and listen to Christina. Thank you. Thank you for the very generous introduction. And thanks to Julia, Peter and Candice in particular and everyone in the department for allowing me to come to see us. Having the chance of sharing that which my research focused on last year is a great opportunity for me. I wouldn't say that I'm an expertise of lingua franca but I have been working on lingua franca thanks to this project that I'm going to introduce to present to you today. Well, just a quick preview of my tool. I'm going to start by introducing you to this general project which this research is part of. The corpus and sub corpus of which I worked. The historical background in order to contextualize the documents that I have been analysing and the writers, the analysis of the documents and then the conclusion. Well, let's start from the general project. The general project, the title is Linguistic Representations of Identity, Social Linguistic Models and Historical Linguistics and the scientific coordinator was Piera Modinelli, University of Bergamo. These are the members of my unit where I worked in Diderbo, I worked at Tabarbara that was the scientific coordinator and then Laura Mori, Maria Rosaria Zinzi, Margarita DiSalvo and I'm that to them for some of the information that I'm going to present both today and on the next. Well, in this project what we did was to study the linguistic variation and the language varieties in use. In the Mediterranean area at the beginning of the early modern age we had the attention to the writing system in use among the writers as well as the linguistic variation. So our corpus that we collected in the State Archive of Venice it made of seven different collections which date back to 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries but for my research I focus just on documents of 16th and 17th century. The first six collections have been directly collected in the State Archive that means I went there with Barbara Turcate and we took copies of the documents and then we transcribed the documents and the last one is this one, it's available online and it's part of another project that is called Divenire and it was where Maria Pedani Fabris worked and you can go online and you can go through it what you find is this kind of documents. So our objective was to show what the Romans used in these documents was so what was the variety of Italian language used hypothesizing that possible social linguistic parameters would have been what so the typology of text who the writer was the writer who wrote the text where the place where the writer wrote the text and to whom so the addressing and all these intertwined with the historical period so with some changes related to the historical period in which this text were written hence I can go back to the presentation sorry so what I did was to adopt at the beginning I adopted a qualitative and quantitative methodological framework and I was looking for these traits since the documents were the document involved the presence of a Venetian subject or they were documents which moved between Constantinople and Venice in the 16th and 17th century I took into consideration the linguistic futures we defined the Venetian language then those linguistic futures which have been recognized as being characteristic of the Northern Italian Coine and then since a previous study carried out by Daniele Baglioni and more about the documents of Tunisian chanceleri demonstrated that the language variety used was mainly the Tuscan variety of Italian language I took into consideration also some traits of the Tuscan Romans and since in the Mediterranean area there was I mean it was the place where Lingua Franca developed I took also into consideration the traits of Lingua Franca so what I did was to look for all these traits inside the World Corpus the documents of the World Corpus but I must be sincere that the well the idea, the idea was that I wouldn't have found Tuscan Romans traits but I would have found more Venetian or Northern Italian Coine traits in comparison with the documents which were written in Tunisia but at the beginning when I finished this collection of data I felt as to be in front of this kind of painting where all those points on the canvas were giving something and were connected and shaped into an image but in which it seemed to be difficult to understand what perspective should be adopted in order to decipher them and to focus on the image behind them each perspective like the language contact or the interference from non-Roman cell one or Roman-Italian dialect interferences seemed valid but at the same time it seemed that they could not be applied in a systematic and absolute way to the World Corpus indeed the majority of variants occurred in a discontinuous way and the traits appeared to be without a social linguistic motivation and the variants seemed to overlap also within the same text and with reference to the same variable for this reason however among the World traits there were some traits which I have defined plus anti-Tuscan traits which were representative of the Venetian language or Northern Italian Quine I saw that these kind of traits seemed to be a constant presence in some specific kinds of documents of the World Corpus and those documents which were contained mainly in these two sets so contained in the Turkish letters and writings and then contained in the Michelini of Turkish documents Consequently what I did was to select 66 documents within this sub-corpus to which I added these further two documents I haven't worked on these I haven't transcribed these but this is a text edited in 1969 by Giorgio Ramondo Cardona and these are texts of another writer which I'm going to introduce soon which was edited and published by Rotman I forgot to tell you before that the total amount of documents that have been collected in the State Archive of Venice was 1,436 documents and these documents have all been typed digitalized I wrote me Margarita di Salvo and in the last part of the project Renzo Giacobucci, that is a paleograph transcribed all the texts the same texts that I showed you before so it took really a huge time but well, among these World Corpus I selected 66 texts taken from these two set of collections so what I did at that point was I questioned what they had in common looking for something which could explain why some threads were more recurrent here than in other collections why some specific threads could only be found here and not in the others or anyway in a higher quantity here than in the other collections those I looked at the typology of text so I saw what kind of texts were inside these two collections and there were translations there were petitions there were commercial letters but not too many mainly there were letters between the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the Doge in Venice and then the content of these texts could be texts that were defining the borders of land or battles or I don't know some bureaucratic and administrative issues then there were translations of diplomatic documents written mainly in Persian or Greek or Arabic as well as private letters between the Ottoman Sultan and some trusted men then what I did was I tried to identify the writer because if we don't have any knowledge about the writer it can be difficult to arrive at an interpretation of the data that you find so I tried to identify the writer and of course I made my life easier taking those texts which were written by some specific writer and which was quite easy to identify because they are those members that in the Ottoman Empire worked as interpreters and they are which are called dragomans for this you have dragomans in the title of this presentation so the majority of them were specific subjects as interpreters at the Ottoman Empire but they also worked not only in the Ottoman Empire as interpreters for the Sultan and the Bailo but also they worked for the Venetian Board of Trade in Venice so what they did they were interpreters for Ottomans who visited Venice and then they also worked specifically only for the Bailo or the Dorje in Venice consequently so at this point my objective became to demonstrate that the linguistic variation found in this text were first of all determined by the lack of a written model of reference in the Levant and where the Tuscan Romance wasn't the prestigious variety and therefore my hypothesis was that dragomans variation could be interpreted as a representative of a social act there is a reason for which but I will why I thought about the social act but before showing you the analysis I would like to give you some historical background of where this text were produced and some biographical information about the writers what you have here it is a map of the Venetian commercial roots and when we can date the birth of Venice as an independent province back to the year 829 when the Dorje nominated himself as a dux Veneti Gorum determined Venice's independence from Byzantium according to Thirid the history of the national economic expansion can be identified in three different periods however what is more important for me and for this map is the periods of the Second Crusade when Venice moved to the Levant and when the Papacy decided to be helped by Venice in the Second Crusade and then what Venice did was to put the ships but they never reached the Holy Land because Venice moved towards those areas in which it was interested for its commercial expansion so the 1200 and 4 is the year of the Second Crusade and it is the same year of the birth of the ephemeral Latin Oriental Empire and the triumph of Venice which became the uncontested commercial intermediary between the West and the East starting from the 13th century Venice established its colonies on the Eastern and Dalmatian coast so here and then established colonies here on this side of Greece and then in Candia and in Cyprus and then Venice arrived also on the Black Sea and of course Constantinople was one of the main colonies of Venice where Venice had its commercial exchange so while the Latin Oriental Empire existed the Venetian delegate was the Podesta and then this same figure of the Podesta was substituted later by the Bailo a figure that is called the Bailo that was in the Ottoman porta and the person in charge was therefore the diplomatic relation with the Ottoman Empire as soon as the Ottoman Empire started to spread the power of Venice reduced and then Venice was losing lands and it was in that moment that Venice became really extremely important to maintain as better as possible relationship with the Ottoman Empire and it is in this same period that these professionalized figures appeared the dragomans I mean they were officialized as interpreters because their duty went beyond the simple work of translators they were those people those intermediary subjects between Venice and Constantinople who made possible the relationships between Venice and the Ottoman Sultan or on the contrary who would have the power of destroy it because it depends how they translated the documents they could change or shape they tax in a different way so in this area this is Constantinople and starting from the 13th centuries here in Perra a community of Italian represented by Genoese and Venetians settled and like this there were many other communities where Venice used to bring Venetian people directly there and to live there so there were these small communities of Venetian or Genoese who settled in the Levant and who lived in this context however in this mass of relationships and connections Venice became a crucial center for linguistic and cultural exchange both in Italy and here in the Levant and it is within this scenario that these figures, the dragomans, appeared so in starting from the mid 16th centuries there was an important distinction between the people who were just interpreters and those figures were dragomans because the dragomans were the professionalized interpreters the official interpreters for the Sultan and the Doge Dragomans did not exist only in the Levant so they were also in Tunisia but as Balioni says they were quite different these two figures and the dragomans in Tunisia were not so important as they were in the Levant side so Dragomans is one of the many Romance variants of an Arabic word which passed through the Turkish language and as Rotman says the term appears in Latin notary records from Genoese colonies of Pera that I showed you before and Caffa on the Black Sea as early as 1280 it is Italian cognates Dragomano or Dragomanno appear in Venetian and other Italian diplomatic records starting in the late 15th century hence Dragomano was the interpreter who had the duty to carry out the diplomatic relations between the Sultan and the Ottoman Empire and the Doge and Venice when the most serene Republic of Venice had the need to maintain good relationship with the Ottoman Empire and when many Venetians lived in communities in the Levant like Pera so they translated this is another picture of Dragomans and this is a website where the many information about Dragomans have been collected actually is from Rotman who studied deeply this figure and these are the Ottoman Firmani that they used to translate so in that archive that I showed you before a line you have the original document which is in Arabic or in Persian or in Greek and then the corresponding translation so their job had multiple roles as Dragomans were interpreters and translators but also most importantly they were intermediaries between two words two cultures and two languages they were trans-imperial subjects who had to mediate between two different cultural models which they knew very well Dragomans were both praised and scorned and their work was physically and mentally hard they were frequently exposed to different kinds of dangerous situations and many times they paid with their own lives it was for this reason that their work was admired by many however, since for many of them becoming a Dragomans corresponded to an improvement in their social position above all in the Levant and at the beginning of the establishment of this profession they were also looked upon with suspicion in fact they were often considered opportunists and social climbers because of this several bylaws complained about having to speak through the Dragomans especially in the Levant Dragomans became the filters through which bylaws and sultans had to express themselves and they could not be sure that Dragomans could be trusted however it was in the origin of the Dragomans that we determined how determined how faithful they were in fact Dragomans belonged to two different contexts some of them came from Venetian families others were Venetian subjects in the Stato dell'Adamar so in the Levant in the Venetian colonies like Pera while others were a subject of the sultan according to Bruno the majority of Dragomans at the port were of Greek origins and those of Greek origins used to work for Turks there were just there were three different bases of recruitment for Dragomans the young people of among the Venetian citizens and they were formed they could be formed in Venice or they could be sent to the Levant in order to learn the Oriental languages then the colonial nobility of the Adriatic and the Eastern Mediterranean and then the Venetians in the Latin community of Pera the Dragomans could be Venetian or Venetian origins or they could be Cypriot, Greek or of Turkish origin as well however all Dragomans above all those who lived in the Levant belonged to an operative community within which they gradually started to transfer their profession in a linear way of generation so the first Dragomans started as as an interpreter was just by chance that the first Dragomans that I'm going to analyze became a Dragomans it was recognized as a Dragomans it's only later the profession was recognized as an official profession and then in this in this context the community of Dragomans gained prestigious became more prestigious in the Levant community and the Dragomans starting to transfer became an endogamous community and they started to transfer their profession in a linear way however independently from what their specific duties were Dragomans belonged to this highly endogamous micro community whose borders were fluid and could extend or reduce according to the perspective from which they were considered well in considering them I took Rotman's perspective into consideration according to which Dragomans were actors who struggled and brokered and those helped to shape political, religious and linguistic boundaries between the early modern Ottoman and the Venetian states well these are I took into consideration five different Dragomans of which you find some information here two different historical periods 16th and 17th century and they are they share some peculiarities and they differ for others for example the first one, Girola Mochivran and Michele Membre they were not part of the Venetian community of Pera because the first one was born in Metony and the second one was born in Cyprus while the last three, Giacomo Denores Tomaso Tarsia and Giacomo Tarsia they were part of the Venetian community of Pera then Girola Mochivran and Giacomo Denores had spent both of them their childhood among Turks because they were they had they were stolen by Turks and it was in this way that they learned the Arabic and Persian language or the Turkish language then Tomaso and Giacomo Tarsia they were born in Dormesce and they were members of a noble family as well as Giacomo Denores while Michele Membre and Girola Mochivran were not noble not belong to a noble family so what else about them and then their linguistic repertoire as you can see Girola Mochivran as Greek as well as Membre and Denores they knew Greek because they were all they all grow up in Cyprus or in Metony and then they have Italian and for example according to Pedani Fabris Giacomo Denores learned the Italian language only when he was he moved to Venice again so he was born into an Italian family a Venetian family but he had forgotten the language and then he was learning the Italian language again when he moved to Venice and these futures which characterised the the drugomans have been taken into consideration as as possible social linguistic parameters for interpreting the linguistic variation. The hypothesis was that the birth and the establishing of the community of drugomans at the social level corresponded also to an establishing at the linguistic level of a drugomans social act. Estelist Canon representative of these specific figures in their historical geographical context. Furthermore what I thought is that the occurrence of Venetian or North and Coney linguistic futures or threads could have varied according to the address of the correspondence as well as the typology of the written document. Consequently the aim was to explain and motivate the drugomans linguistic behaviour in correlation to these social linguistic parameters which are those which I underlined before to be or not be characterised by captivity among Turks to be or not be part of the Venetian community of Pera. The languages that they knew, the place where they worked to be or not to be part of a noble family and the typology of document that they wrote. This idea about considering the possibility to find out a social act among drugomans it was also sustained by the fact that drugomans as you have already seen in the previous image were identified by their aesthetic aspect because they used to wear some specific habits and these are the paintings where there is the representation of the duty of drugomans at the sultan archimans and they were at the Sultan court and what they are always displayed as members which wear some specific costumes, which some specific elements such as the woolen gowns with the fur colour and the dark cap which is called Kalpak and they were a sign of non-muslim drugomans so these were recognized as those drugomans who worked in the connection between Venice, the west and the east, the Ottoman empire. Well, these are other paintings representing the drugomans. So let's move to the analysis and linguistic analysis. What I thought I took as possible social linguistic variants some graphic elements at the graphic and phonological and morphology level and I looked into lexeme. So at the graphic level I took into consideration the graphic alternation, allography and the presence or absence of Latin graphines as a representative of a more diplomatic typology of text or as a more representative of a more conservative writing. At a phonological level I looked into the detanglization, metaphony, treatment of affricates, voicing and the voicing of intervocalic stops and degemination. At the morphological level I looked at the alternation between the article L realized as L or the article realized as L and then I looked also at the realization of the article realized as I or better as E and Li. Then I looked at the alternation between me and T versus a EO2 as a subject. I looked at the alternation of the preposition in the form of D I looked at the realization as L versus analytic articulated preposition and then I looked at the occurrence of the C in the infinitive reflexive construction. I looked at the apocopate past participle and at the first plural person verbs in emo instead of yamo like facemoi instead of facamo and then I looked at the occurrence of subjuntive fussero and at the occurrence of cosi or cosi and then I looked at the presence of Latin or typically Venetian leximes. These are those threats that at the beginning I have defined as a representative of the Venetian variety of language and as a representative of the Northern Italian Koine. These linguistic threats have been selected because they are representative of these two linguistic aspects. For example, as Thomas argued, the presence of the voiceless velar and alveolar stop and of voiced alveolar stop is one of the main differences between Tuscany and the Venetian variety. Furthermore, in Venetian Romans there is the tendency of the Venetian like in Patron. These threats are also typical of the Northern Romans varieties to which Sanga as well as Tomasin refers as Lombard language or Northern Italian Koine. Rolf II states that in the Northern Italian Koine the voiced alveolar stop is general mute in the western area while it is restored in the eastern one where there is voicing of intervocalic stop. Consequently these linguistic futures have been selected considering the Venetian variety as well as the Venetian exported in the Levant. So the Venetian language of the Lada Amar. Due to the fact that the subjects involved in the analysed text were mainly Venetians, only the Venetians and Northern threat have been considered here but as I showed before I looked and I observed also other threats which are representative of Tuscany. So the distribution of these threats among the drugomans as you can see in the handout that I gave you in the point A you have the distribution of threats which are we find common threats it's possible to find common threats among all the five drugomans then distinctive threats which are representative of those drugomans like Chivran and Membre representative of the 16th century. Then threats which can be identified as Northern Italian Quinae threats and Venetian threats and then further differentiation between Chivran and Membre itself. So there is and I gave in A1 you have the common threats among the five drugomans where I give you the examples the occurrence that I found in the text then in A2 you have the distinctive traits of Chivran and Membre which are those threats that are only found in Chivran and Membre and not in the other drugomans then you have in point 5 and 6 those threats which differentiate Chivran and Membre even though they belong to the same to the same period. So what's the first I mean at the first side to what's happened that's looking for those threats representative of Venetian or Northern Quinae variety it appeared that the drugomans belonging to the first period so to the 16th centuries differed from the drugomans belonging to the 17th century. And this of course can be explained from the chronic perspective but let's go ahead and let's see what's happened at the morphological level. We have I have looked into the alternation of the article well regarding these forms so regarding the singular L, L, L, L and the plural E, E what I think it's important to say is that the form L, so for the plural instead of E would conform to a bureaucratic Pan-Italian usage. In fact while I is a specific mark of the notary writing in Venice Lee seems to mark the bureaucratic writing in the Mediterranean Chancellories and he was also found in Baglione. The analysed text have demonstrated a higher occurrence of Lee in all drugomans and you have here so the occurrence for Lee is higher than the occurrence of I. So we can say that this linguistic future show that their writing was a bureaucratic writing in a contraposition to other writings which present these other variants. The analysed more problematic was to explain this alternation between L and L because first of all I would have expected to find the form L which is typical of Venetian language but it was absent in the text and then what I found it was only an alternation between L and L. According to Rolf and Renzi, L, L were distributed in the Tuscan Romans according to the phonetic of the sentence. However, due to the interference from southern and western dialects, the L form penetrated also in the Florence Romans but he became the only he penetrated in the Romans Florence but he never established above L and he was while in the Venetian Romans he became the most used article in the form of L instead of L. In the distribution of the variant L in the analysed drugman text demonstrated an higher occurrence of the variant L for Chivran and then as we expected from the chronic point historical point of view we have no occurrences of L and we find only L for the two Tarsian brothers and for the Norse. What surprised here was Membre because Membre belonged to the 16th century as well as Chivran and I would have expected the same linguistic behaviour for this article but what happened I as I told you at the beginning I do not only consider those texts in the Venetian archive but I also took into consideration that Relazione di Persia that Membre wrote in 1540 and that he sent he wrote and he sent to the doge so he didn't translate the text he was writing a text and in this context when he was writing a text what we have what happened that the only occurrence that we find is L so this data is going to change. If we look at the typology of text when Membre was working as interpreter and was translating the documents so from Arabic or Persian into Italian he was using the Il while he was writing his relation he was writing using the L so the L is representative of the Venetian variety in contraposition to the Toscan Il so this is this is what emerged from the from the analysis of the text then if we look at the occurrence of the alternates between the and D and then from the synthetic versus analytic form again we have something which is similar to what the graphic and script data told us that there is a difference between Chivran and Membre and the Norse and Tarsia it looks like if there was a cut between these two these two groups of the arguments and starting the synthetic versus analytic preposition so that is the synthetic realization versus what we have is for all the arguments here we have a common behavior for which the synthetic realization was used and it has been demonstrated for example in studies that once at that time was used the synthetic realization so this in the handwriting instead of the analytic form this was representative of the oral orality which had a predominance on the writing and in fact the analytic it would have been considered century later centuries later has the classic form or the more prestigious form so the synthetic variation the synthetic variant was more representative of the oral discourse then the analytic one which was more representative of the writing style so in this aspect the five arguments behave in the same way so furthermore the baglione for example in its analysis of text written in Tunisia in the regencies it states that the analytic representation of speculative preposition is typical of text produced representative of a simplified Italian language in comparison to the other as if you recognize it as one threat of that simplified Italian language used in the Mediterranean so and this seems to do not occur for these five arguments then regarding the other considered sociolinguistic variables that you have in the last point the end out that is letter B as you can see again there is a catch between a separation between in comparison with Tartia brothers but here in this context what is interesting is the Norse the Norse is that drugman who was living between the 16th and the 70th century so he was in the middle of these two periods which are representative of Tartia on the other side and the Norse even though he behaved mostly as the later drugomans like Tartia he had some linguistic futures that can be compared to those who characterized Tartia but once again what is interesting is that these linguistic futures I mean when the Norse goes closer to is not writing translation so is not translating documents but again is writing some documents which are written directly by him and these kind of documents are the petitions or the pleas that the Norse does. So to sum up what we have we have that two groups which are differentiated and the register linguistic variation seems to be related to the following social linguistic parameters so we have on one side a plus-hantitus plus-venetian linguistic behaviors where there are threats which occur alongside the presence of at least of one of the following parameters I mean for those writers who are characterized at least one by one or more of these parameters we have a plus-hantitus can plus-venetian linguistic behavior while for those for those writers which are characterized by these other threats a linguistic behaviors which move towards an antitus can or a minus-venetian minus-antitus can minus-venetian so what I want to say is that if the writer that we consider he was characterized by having been captured by Turks or he is not writing a translation not only writing a typology of text which fit inside the translation but he cannot be considered as a proper Venetian because although he was living in the community of Pera but he had a story of life which bring him far from to be Venetian if he wasn't belonging to a Nobel status family so this in his language that he used in the text we find a more which are which can be considered antitus can or and can be considered as Venetian threats for those writers that on the contrary were not captured by Turks when they were child and they were proper Venetian because they are recognized as Venetian as belonging to the most serene Republic of Venetian group if they are member of a Nobel status family and if the text translation and if they belong to the historical period of 17th century so the linguistic behavior that we find is that they are more oriented toward toward that language which would have been recognized as a standard language later in Italy so they are more oriented toward the Tuscan variety there than the others even though they do not show a Tuscan variety in their text there are more threats which are closer to the Tuscan variety than to the Venetian variety so consequently in my opinion what emerged from the analysis of these five Dragomans writings he said there is a linguistic differentiation we should be considered in a diachronic perspective since the linguistic variation follows the linguistic change with the language in Italy which was used in the course was undergoing and conforming more and more to the Tuscan variety of the language and this is demonstrated by both the linguistic behavior of Tarsia brothers and partially in the Norse who is the Dragomans on the border between the two there is a social linguistic variation which is evident at the level of writing as well as of the language and this social linguistic variation seems to be strictly connected with the specific parameters considered for our analysis above all the parameters which refer to be or not to be to proper Venetian what they show in the previous slide and what I wonder what I question is how this can be interpreted considering that apart from Chiran and Membre and the Norse these Venetian threats are more evident in those texts included within the translation typology I mean what I notice that not only Chiran and Membre were characterized by more Venetian threats but also that when the Norse had a more Venetian linguistic behavior it was I found it was writing another text that was different from the translation was writing his own texts his own correspondence so this is what is common between Membre and the Norse again if we take if you remember Membre in the behavior of the alternation between L and Il whenever he writes a translation we find the occurrence of Il which is representative of a more doscanized variety of the language whenever we find the occurrence of L we have a text which is more Venetian oriented and in Membre this variant was much more present in the relation that he wrote to the doge so it is not a translation so the typology of text as well as the content of the text and as well as the address of the text seem to have a role in this variation and so what I would like to suggest is that this can be read as a kind of negotiation of belonging to a group or belonging to another group or to be recognized in a group or to be recognized in another group when writing both in fact it is because when writing both the report and the please in order to be trusted and falling into the category of drugomans connected with Ottomans rather to Venetians both Membre and Horace felt the need to be identified as members of the Venetian collectivity within this perspective their writings became representative of writer's capacity to establish a relation with his reader in this case the doge in this context the writing so the text the written text should be considered in force to establish a common and shared background with a symbolic or informative function between the writer and the reader hence the message content and the address determined drugomans writing style and in this context the relation between the writer and the reader implies a common and shared use of an oral and written code which assumes the value of an identity marker in other words it turns into an act of identity or of identification naturally the selection of linguistic items and varieties by the drugomans both culturally or socially oriented is unconsciously produced however it is used by them to identify themselves within a group hence although it was not possible to confirm the original hypothesis about the existence of a drugomans social actor we have seen that all these threads are not common to all the drugomans for which we can identify a social act it has been possible to identify those drugomans for which the linguistic variation can be interpreted as a social practice adopted in order to show a status of belonging to a group therefore when these drugomans were working in the role of their mediaries and writing diplomatic documents their behavior emphasizes less specific Venetian futures while when they needed to establish a functional relation with the doge they socially oriented behavior moved them toward a more Venetian variety of the language however considering that drugomans characterized by the antithesis kind of Venetian traits are exclusively represented by two because we have only found these kinds of traits in Chivran and Membre and only partially in the Norse and considering that they belong to the both belong to the 16th centuries while the Norse the Norse is between 16th and 17th centuries and considering also that Darcia brothers for whom the minus antithesis traits are more valid belong to the 17th centuries so taking into account that all this consideration I would also interpret this data as the exemplification of the status that the Italian language had in the 11th not only it was the language used in chancelories between the Ottomans and Venetians but it was also the communicative code used pragmatically by these people those neither Venetian Romans dialect nor Tuscan Romans dialect were the exclusive varieties rather the Italian language was represented by Romans varieties which moved along a continuum varieties colored with Venetian traits but not identifiable with a specific one hence in the 11th is not a dominion there is not a dominion of a dialect above another one or of a variety above another one but there is a mobile and iridescent variety of language which adapts the situation to the content of the text and to the address of the correspondence in fact all Tartius brothers are much more or less Venetians than the other consider writers their writing cannot in any case be regarded as a representative of a Tuscan variety in their text too there are many different elements which allow us to judge the Italian in the 11th as a variety of language characterized by an overlapping of different features consequently all these linguistic variations should be taken as being due to the lack of a reference model which could interest the Dragoman in the 11th it is for this reason that it would seem pointless to define what exactly the variety of languages in use among the Dragoman words on the contrary the continuum which emerges within the Dragomans writing as well as in the world corpus that have been collected and the words and that was analyzed that's where gives a different picture of the Mediterranean as well as of the lands on it they were characterized by a rich ecology and as Dostral observes the reason to this rich ecology early modern Mediterranean composite politics necessarily embraced practices of linguistic pragmatism that made no attempt to face this linguistic differences or to cause any form of monolingual homogeneity on their empires this should not only consider true in consideration of different languages but also in consideration of different varieties of the same language in this case the Italian language it is not possible to imagine that the Bembo model was spreading which was spreading in Italy was also spreading in all the foreign territories or colonies like Tunisia or the Levant Italian was in use as Testa points out it is almost impossible for the linguists to trace unique and specific traits due to the too many linguistic forties which contribute to the formation of the Levant Italian within this context the only way one has for characterizing what the language among Dragomans as well as the language in the in the world corpus was is to understand the why to whom where and when this context was written as well as to focus on its contents these factors become crucial for recognizing those social identity markers which are manifested both in the language and in the form through which it is expressed the writing and those which allow us to interpret and motivate the linguistic variation considering this I would like to conclude with Rotman's words saying that since Dragomans epitomized trans-imperial subjects not works first political and social boundaries between empires between Venetian cities and colonial subjects as well as between different estates with metropolitan Venetian society we have to assume that the Dragomans linguistic behavior and their writing should be considered within the perspective of the community of practice of better as where Dragomans are a community of practice where the Dragomans are an aggregate of inter-round mutual engagement in endeavor represented by ways of doing things, ways of talking beliefs, values, powers in short practices. Thank you. I'm finished. These Dragomans these five that I consider No. The brothers obviously communicate but the previous three they didn't communicate because Chivrani was the first one he died, Membre became the second Dragomans, the Norse was the third one so they are I forgot to tell this one that Chivrani was the first in absolute and he was recognized as a Dragomans only later, not when he started to be an interpreter synchronically so it's not the case that it's over a period of time The thing is that I gave this community of practice interpretation because here I presented five Dragomans but I worked on text which are synchronically in the same period so for 16th century I don't have only Chivrani and Membre or in the 17th century it's only the Norse and Tarsie here I bring, I brought five Dragomans but I have looked into I mean I have looked for these traits in the world corpus that wasn't only for Dragomans and also from other Dragomans which are contemporaneous to some of Membre and some others to Tarsie, like I don't know, Niccolò Cambi or other Dragomans Yeah, there was there was a training program which were involved those Dragomans which belonged to the Venetian community because there were some there was a project in the 16th century of opening a school called La Scuola di Giovanni di Lingua of Young of Languages in Venice because they wanted to teach languages, the Arabic version I mean the languages of the Ottoman Empire to them and however in Venice this project didn't work very well so what they used to do was to send Venetian young people to the Levant to learn the language while in France these schools worked much better than in Italy so this is the only thing I know about a common training of these people and what they do when they were sent to the Levant they used to spend their life among men within the Bailua household that was their residency where they were formed so they learned the language through a cotta that he was aware of the Turkish or Arabic language and then some of them they went back to Venice and they worked there in this connection as intermediaries in the connection with Ottomans and this is the only thing that I know so what they have they shared the same place they were formed in the same way and the idea of community of practice I thought about that and at the beginning I thought about the social act for dragomans because not only because of the aesthetic value that they were all similar and they wanted to be identified as dragomans but also because from a stylistic point of view these documents what they share is how they open the letters how they close the letters how they they they point out the date for which they have the Arabic and the Italian version of the date yeah have I replied to your question I think what you've explained much more clearly why you used that in particular this but my understanding of the community of practice isn't formalized in any sense it's not like you have any training going on or whatever it's a something that's spread they are yeah the thing is that among dragomans there are as I try to tell maybe I wasn't clear there are three different kind of dragomans these are all dragomans were trained inside the school so they were Venetian sent to the Levant and those were trained inside the school where they spent their many years of their life at least 8 10 years there living among themselves and with the Sultan then there were those dragomans who just became dragomans because they knew the languages so they had to learn for example they were not formed in the school they had to learn the language because was captured by Turks when he was a child the Norse was captured by Turks when he was a child for this reason they had to learn the language and they had to learn the costumes and the cultures of Ottomans while the Tarsias brothers they were formed inside the school they were sent to study these languages so they are different typology of dragomans and in the translation of the documents of the text I mean they what they say when I say about the stylistic way in which they translated the documents that arose among them I mean at least I don't have any evidence which say that it was told how to open a letter how to close a letter how to mark the date how to refer to the doge or how to refer to the Sultan and what is more interesting is that when they were writing I mean when they were translating the documents they wanted to please the address they used some specific formula towards the doge they wanted to be firm and say no you invited my land I'm going to give you a battle so they used another form so in this sense I thought that the community of practice concept could be applied it's a I was just going to mention the pictures you showed the group of them so that's a community of practice somehow how more that yeah where did I go yeah, Ottoman yeah, Ottoman and Turkish and I was Ottoman-Turkish and when for example in Divenire collection you have the document written in the Oriental language is referred as Ottoman so it was the Ottoman-Turkish of course and I mean what they would like to have is to be able to exceed to the original document that one written in Ottoman or in Greek in order to compare what it was written there originally and what they translated but I don't know those languages like this yeah, even for example related to this in the correspondence that the Baylor sent to Venice many times they complained because I mean when they were talking about the project of a school of a Giovanni di Lingui in Venice it was because the Baylor was complaining by the fact that these young people they used to learn the language by the way they taught the Cotsa that was the teacher and they say explicitly that the Cotsa used to teach them the colloquial variety so they were not able to write properly this is what the Baylor many Baylor were complaining about this issue for this reason they thought about the project to where other dragomans which were already well formed and had learned the high variety could teach the others but it never worked very well yeah, it's really difficult yeah, that is totally agree I think that we cannot be we cannot be sure 100% but I have checked the translation I mean my transcriptions with the paragraph he went through the wall text again and I mean what I had transcribed it was confirmed apart from a few things but especially this L, E, I it was particularly checked for this reason I mean what I wanted to say is that I mean this the variation that can be observed since the variation moved towards a variety of languages of another one so towards to be more venetian or more Tuscan to consider it as a kind of identity marker in the sense that whenever they were involved in direct relationship with the doge they used to to refer things throw a variety of language closer to that one of the doge I don't know if a kind of accommodation but not, but I don't want to say that this was a conscious accommodation because what they had both the language both the language in their in their knowledge, I mean they had the both the varieties so it's whenever because this is what I noticed that whenever I was looking into text that were not translation this more venetian threads appeared more than in the other documents and the other typology of documents so that the typology of document the content of the document and the person that should have received the documents could have an impact on the linguistic variation this was what I was saying can you say it again sorry yeah but what about if the address is always the same and you have this variation with the same address C I mean this when I say to the the documents were sent to the doge if I take into consideration membre or chivran the doge is always the same when is going to make to write translation and when he was saying sending him his report the address C is the same but you have this variation between the two typology of text so for this reason I mean I took the into consideration of the typology of text as a possible parameter yeah yeah it's okay okay thank you thank you to you