Sul termine anbūrlāk nel Ms. Vat. Ebr. 411 in giudeo-arabo di Sicilia

Abstract

A Note on the Term anbūrlāk in the Vatican Ms. Ebr. 411 in Judeo-Arabic of Sicily

The obscure term anbūrlāk is found in a poem in Judeo-Arabic from the Vatican Ms. Heb. 411, first published in 1949 by E. Mainz, who related these poems to North African Judeo-Arabic dialects. G. Wettinger convincingly argued, in some later works, that the dialect of the poems was closer to Maltese or to the Judeo-Arabic of Sicily. He also correctly identified the term anbūrlāk with the imborlachu found in many notarial archive documents from Sicily, dating to the 14^th-15^th centuries and explained by H. Bresc as being the canopy of a bed. In the present work, some illustrative occurrences of the term in Medieval Sicilian sources are given, and it is conjectured that the term imborlachium could be based on the Romance word borla, ‘tassel’. The suggestion is therefore posited that the term may have originally indicated just the trimmings and tassels decorating the drapes, and only later on did the meaning extend to the whole canopy. A new reading and translation of the verse is provided, and a transcription of the entire Judeo-Arabic poem in Hebrew vocalized script, as found in the Ms., is published here for the first time.