‘Italians are not inventing any new words,’ the head of the Italian language academy told the Telegraph. ‘They’re not creating anything. They take everything from English.’
Professor Paolo D’Achille is the head of the Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1583. Crusca means ‘bran’, which is what the academy wants to keep out of the fine flour of Italian. English is of course bran.
There was a big hoo-ha in Italy a decade ago when a recruiting poster appealed to young people: ‘Be cool and join the navy.’ I suppose there’d be a bigger hoo-ha in Britain if a recruiting poster was printed in German. These things have their degrees of unacceptability.
We are used to the French adopting English words and giving them a new meaning (such as smoking to mean ‘dinner jacket’). The Italians do the same. An Italian’s ticket is less likely to mean ‘ticket’ than ‘receipt’ or ‘voucher’. By box, Italians mean ‘garage’. By baby parking, they mean a creche and by mister, they mean a ‘coach’ or ‘trainer’ in football.
Among the many English loans words the writer Annamaria Testa wants expunged are a number to do with computing: file for documento, fare un download (scaricare), hard disk (disco fisso), online (in linea) web (rete). New technology creates a scramble among candidates for new vocabulary: in Britain, motoring words (boot, bonnet, windscreen) were adopted that differed from those in America (trunk, hood, windshield).
Fine settimana may be the Italian for weekend, but weekend has changed its meaning fairly rapidly. The 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary gave the period of a weekend as ‘usually extending from Saturday noon or Friday night to Monday’. The current edition has to explain that ‘during the late 19th century, a British worker’s leisure period often began on Saturday at noon’. Italians would find it hard now to oust weekend. Just as bakers turn to farina integrale for healthier loaves, so the Accademia della Crusca will have to live with imported bran.
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