Tag: Italian

Where did Welsh and Irish words come from?

In this post, I look at words inherited by both Welsh and Irish from: Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages (52 words). Proto-Celic, the presumed ancestor of the Celtic languages (8 words). The information comes from the IE-COR database—a database of cognates for 170 words (lexemes) in 109 modern and…… Continue reading Where did Welsh and Irish words come from?

The Italian Language Today

The Italian Language Today, by Anna Laura Lepschy and Giulio Lepschy (2nd edition, 1988) is a useful guide for anyone who has been through a basic to intermediate Italian course.   The book has 2 parts: part one The Linguistic Situation in Italy has 4 sections: Italian today; a historical view; Italian dialects; varieties of…… Continue reading The Italian Language Today

Odds and ends: German

This post covers some small details of German. Rare suffix for males It’s quite common for languages to form the word for a female person or female animal by adding a suffix to the word for the corresponding male. Well-known suffixes of this kind include English -ess and German -in. (adding the German suffix -in…… Continue reading Odds and ends: German

Days of the week in East Asia

Japanese and Korean name 5 days of the week using words for traditional elements (fire, water, wood, metal, earth) and use the words for moon and sun in naming Sunday and Monday. Both languages combine those components with a 2nd component meaning day of the week. Table 1 shows the Japanese and Korean names in…… Continue reading Days of the week in East Asia

Italian places and their inhabitants

Italian place names generally have related adjectives. Many of them are formed in fairly predictable ways by just adding a suffix to the place name (eg romano from Roma, Milanese from Milano and Napoletano from Napoli). Common suffixes used in place names include (in the masculine plural form) -ani, -tani, -esi, -ensi, -i, -ali, -giani,…… Continue reading Italian places and their inhabitants

Rhotic consonants

Sounds similar to the English sound spelled with the letter <r> are called rhotics. This post looks at rhotics. Rhotics are named after the Ancient Greek letter ρ (rho). Rhotics vary greatly in their: manner of articulation; and place of articulation. Manner of articulation Different rhotics are produced in different manners: as a trill (repeated…… Continue reading Rhotic consonants

North, south, east and west

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Romance languages acquired 2 sets of words for points of the compass: some languages spoken in areas with Atlantic coastlines had nautical terms borrowed from English, via French into Spanish and Portuguese. other languages had words used in the Mediterranean, originating in Italian and spreading to Provençal, Catalan…… Continue reading North, south, east and west

‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants

Single Italian consonants become pronounced as double (long) consonants (‘geminates’) if they follow: a stressed vowel some short unstressed words The Italian name for this process is raddoppiamento syntattico (‘syntactic (re)doubling’), or sometimes rafforzamento fonosyntactico (‘phonosyntactic stregntening’). ‘Syntactic’ refers to the fact that the doubling crosses word boundaries, unlike in word-internal geminate consonants as in [gattto] ‘cat’…… Continue reading ‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants

Medieval sources of some French words

I picked up last year a useful book, aimed at a general audience, about the medieval origins of over 100 French words and phrases. The book is Les mots du Moyen Âge, Fabienne Calvayrac, Marion Vialade (2011, nouvelle edition) I’ve summarised below some that caught my eye. If you are interested, the book has a…… Continue reading Medieval sources of some French words