Italian Loan Words Research Articles

The Linguistic Provenance of the Hebrew King Arthur (1279) Reassessed

Abstract Based on its inclusion of non-Hebrew Italian loanwords and the sole surviving manuscript copy being Italian, the current consensus among scholars is that an Italian Jew authored Melekh Artus (1279), the only extant medieval Hebrew translation of Arthurian material. The following study destabilizes this consensus opinion demonstrating why these loanwords are a precarious tool when ascertaining this text’s linguistic provenance. Not only are most of the said loanwords not necessarily Italian, but, using Italian copies of the French biblical commentator Rashi, this study establishes that Jewish Italian scribes sometimes Italianized Old French loanwords they encountered in their Hebrew sources. Thus, the few loanwords that are Italianisms do not prove Italian authorship but merely that the sole surviving copy was produced by an Italian-Jewish scribe adhering to the scribal conventions of his times.

Il contatto linguistico nel dizionario: italianismi e lessicografia digitale

Linguistic contact manifests itself primarily in the vocabulary, giving rise to phenomena of loanwords of various kinds. Like few other languages, Italian has had and continues to play a prominent role as a contact language. As a consequence many Italian loanwords can be found in the world’s languages, enriching both sectorial languages and the common vocabulary. The preferred place to document lexical influences from other idioms are dictionaries, especially dictionaries of loanwords, now available in digital format. A new type are parallel digital repertoires such as the Osservatorio degli Italianismi nel Mondo (OIM), which, based on interconnected databases, make it possible to observe the importance of the phenomenon in a given language and to make interlinguistic comparisons with respect to the results and specific factors of historical-cultural contacts. The contribution describes the phenomenology of Italianisms, the methodology and structure of the database, and some exemplary cases of borrowings from Italian by other languages, including German.

Appunti sugli italianismi correnti nella lingua svedese. Indagini su un corpus giornalistico (gennaio-luglio 2019)

The article provides a list of 80 Italian loanwords that may be found in Swedish today, from aperitivo to villa: 30 of them are direct loans from Italian, 34 have been imported through French, 16 through German, English or some other Germanic language. We also add a short list of five words formed in Swedish on the basis of an Italian loanword. Our list is based on a corpus of articles published under the category “Italien” on the online version of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter during the first six months of 2019. For every headword we provide grammatical information, one or more definitions, the date of the first attestation, the first three passages where the lexical unit occurs in a certain meaning, an Italian translation of the passages, additional word forms that are not present in the quoted passages and the total number of occurrences in the corpus. Some comments follow.

The Percentage of Italian and Turkish Loanwords in the dialect of Knin

The dialect of Knin – whose ikavian component is stressed here – has historically embraced many Turkish and Italian loanwords. The Italian loanwords can be seen as the basic stratum of borrowings, since they were borrowed at large during the longer Italian rule, with Turkish loanwords having been decimated as the society advanced, which can be seen in comparison to the landscape in Imotski-Bekija dialects, where they comprise a large part of vocabulary. Overall, both the Italian and the Turkish loanwords comprise all kinds of borrowings from the respective languages, as documented in the text. There I distinguished Italian loanwords from Romance loanwords – which are not herein included – representing, unlike Italian loanwords, early borrowings from the local, eastern Adriatic Romance dialects, now extinct.

Italian Loanwords in Serbian and the Influence of Cultural Encounter on Language

This paper deals with Italian loanwords that entered the standard Serbian language, and with a certain number of lexemes that belong to colloquial registers, in the first place to a variety which is defined as the language of the young, in terms of diastratic variations, as well as with Italian loanwords in the fields of art, fashion, and gastronomy. The latter are divided, with regard to chronology, to the loanwords from the period of the Republic of Venice, Tuscan loanwords, cultural Italian loanwords, and new cultural Italian loanwords. Each of the categories listed is observed with regard to an appropriate cultural-historical context, which implies presenting historical circumstances and cultural influences that contributed to their entering the Serbian language.

Stress Assignment in Italian Loanwords in English and its Impact on the Stressing of Foreign Words by Native English Speakers

Les emprunts italiens en anglais reproduisent à plus de 95 % le schéma accentuel de la langue source dans les structures en <VCV#>. La faible autonomisation du système anglais, qui se traduit principalement par l’apparition de quelques variantes accentuelles, démontre que l’anglais emprunte non seulement une structure lexicale, mais également des données phonologiques de cette même structure. Ces données dictionnairiques, confrontées à des données orales obtenues au moyen de tests réalisés sur des locuteurs anglophones, permettent de formuler des hypothèses sur la perception qu’ont les locuteurs anglophones des mots italiens en particulier, avec un taux de correspondance augmentant en fonction du degré d’exposition des locuteurs à l’italien. L’introduction des mots italiens en anglais et la conservation du schéma accentuel de la langue source pourraient être à l’origine de la création d’un sous-système accentuel à l’œuvre en anglais s’appliquant à tous les termes étrangers en <VCV#>.

Palavras de viagens: a influência do italiano no português do Brasil

Neste estudo apresenta-se os caminhos que seguiram as palavras italianas para o português, por meio dos imigrantes italianos no Brasil. Os dados e os usos do italiano mostram uma distribuição diferente dos demais idiomas, como por exemplo, das línguas indígenas. Estas diferenças são resultantes dos variadas tipos de contato entre os falantes dos respectivos idiomas e demonstram a viagem que fizeram as palavras com os imigrantes.

Hebraizing Arthurian Romance: The Originality of Melech Artus

Ascribing its narrative shaping to its Hebrew author rather than a lost source corroborates Melech Artus's genuine originality and its uniqueness in the Arthurian tradition. (PRR) Melech Artus,1 'King Arthur,' is the only surviving fragment of a medieval Arthurian romance in Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish in which there are several late- and post-medieval adaptations of the German Wigalois.2 This unique Hebrew text, contained in Vatican MS. Urbino 48, is dated 5039 by the author according to the Jewish calendar, the equivalent of AD 1279. Italian loan words in the text indicate that the author's source is a lost Italian version of a French prose romance which the author claims to have 'translated from the vernacular'3 into Hebrew. Apart from the fact that the text breaks off abruptly thirteen lines into the fifth folio, indicating that the author abandoned his endeavor for some unknown reason, the extant narrative is remarkably spare, suggesting abbreviation at some point in its history. Curt Leviant, who translated Melech Artus into English, writes, 'Since the Hebrew scribe's Italian source is lost, it is difficult to determine whether the Jewish translator abridged the text, or whether he already found [sic] an abbreviated version. Nevertheless, there is some ground for speculation that the Hebrew scribe's immediate Italian source was already shortened.'4 Here I refute this idea since, although Leviant remains speculative, his repetition of such assertions as 'Whether or not the scribe possessed an abbreviated Italian text'5 and 'If the Hebrew scribe worked from an already shortened Italian version'6 seems overly insistent. Moses Gaster, Florence Sandler, and Robert G. Warnock also seem to legitimize this proposition, at least implicitly, by referring to the writer as 'translator'7 or 'scribe'8 rather than author in their writings on the text. Leviant's 'ground for speculation' that it is the Italian author who has done the shortening is based on the observation that Malory's and the Hebrew versions of the story of Arthur's begetting by King Uter are equally brief: 'From the point of view of length and compression, Malory resembles the Hebrew Uter more than it does the long O[ld] F[rench].'9 He postulates that 'Malory's brief Uter story may be cited as possible evidence that a shortened O[ld] F[rench] version existed, and that the Italian translator, the Hebrew scribe's immediate source, also had access to a much condensed version of the Uter episode.'10 Even if this were true, it would then be the French rather than the Italian author who had done most of the cutting of material. However, that Malory and the Hebrew version of the Uter story, as Leviant puts it, 'agree in the technique of literary economy'11 is insufficient evidence for an unknown common source. Furthermore, Leviant is able to identify few specific points of agreement between Malory's and the Hebrew renderings of the tale that are not also found in the longer extant French version of the Suite du Merlin. The most specific distinguishing correlation he points out is that while 'the time lapse between Igerna's departure and the military action [against Duke Gorlois by Uter] is not mentioned' in the existing Old French version, it is specified in the other two-three months in the Hebrew and forty days in Malory.12 These are certainly not strong enough textual correspondences to be considered compelling evidence for a common source that has severely pared down the story, which is, of course, why Leviant rightly remains speculative. A more satisfying explanation than the possibility offered by Leviant that the Hebrew writer 'may have abridged even further' 'an already shortened Italian version'13 is that he is solely responsible for the radical alterations. Were this found to be so, it would make him more clearly worthy of the title author rather than 'translator,' which he humbly implies of himself, or 'scribe,' which Leviant calls him, and it would tell us a good deal more about his concerns and interests as a Jew in refitting the Arthurian tales to a non-Indo-European, non-Christian culture. …

Die frühen italienischen Lehnwörter des Englischen

The present study aims at a twofold goal. It evaluates the early English loanwords of Italian origin which the MED, the OED and its nascent third edition record up to the middle of the sixteenth century and it exemplifies how the transfer of Romance loanwords into late Middle and early Modern English should be analyzed. The analysis shows that not more than about two dozens of Italian loanwords were borrowed directly. Only half of them have survived in present-day English. This is much less than what has been assumed so far because many loanwords of Italian origin were transmitted by French whereas others proved to be Latinisms. The transfer does not begin before c. 1400 and only gradually increases after 1500.

Italian Loan Words in the Inflexional Noun System of Modern German

Les mots d'emprunts constituent un sous-ensemble large et homogene dans le lexique allemand. En se basant sur la morphologie naturelle, l'A. les utilise pour fournir une description coherente du systeme flexionnel nominal allemand. Il se sert de la notion de Paradigme et de Condition de Structure de Paradigme dominant pour l'etude de l'integration de mots etrangers dans le systeme allemand, puis compare les resultats de son analyse avec les recentes propositions de Carstairs (1986,1987) concernant les concepts de Macroclasse et de Principe d'Economie de Paradigme

On Italian loan-words in German

On Italian loan-words in German