11
votes
Cosa sono "... Gli inesprimibili!"?
Che orrore per un vero e proprio gentiluomo, chiamare le calze le calze...
"Gli inesprimibili" riferiscono a mutande, calze o guepières (La Repubblica: Se è vietato nominare la guepière). Le donne ...
- 5,118
9
votes
Accepted
History of Italian dialects?
One of the standard works on the subject is certainly the three-volume Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti by the German philologist Gerhard Rohlfs, published in Italian by ...
- 36.4k
8
votes
Accepted
Books on the evolution of Latin into Italian?
For the sake of completeness, let's separate the comparative grammar of Italian, explained in relation to Latin and/or English - as in the pamphlet you link to - and the historical transformation of ...
- 5,118
8
votes
Accepted
How far back can a native Florentine understand their written mother tongue?
You seem to be interested in the oldest Italian text readable by a native speaker. Unfortunately the problem is that there just aren't many old Italian texts, especially from Tuscany. Here I'll list ...
- 12.1k
8
votes
Origine dell'espressione "in tilt"
In inglese si chiamano “pinball machines” o semplicemente “pinball”.
Per i soliti motivi di non conoscenza dell'inglese, in Italia sono noti come “flipper” dal nome delle pinne adoperate per ...
- 17.9k
7
votes
Meaning of 'alzar', 'avolto' and 'pareano' here?
Alzar is the verb "alzare" (with the elision of the last vowel) = to raise, to lift up, to grow.
Avolto seems a poetic form for "avvolto" (past participle) (here the same verses have "avvolto" https:/...
- 6,955
6
votes
Accepted
16th-century character
That would be the corresponding of present-day “&”, a glyph originated from a cursive ligature as a single character of an “e” and a “t”, to form Latin conjunction “et”, that is, “and”. And indeed ...
- 36.4k
6
votes
Accepted
How old is the Italian word "malandrino"?
Grande dizionario della lingua italiana gives some of the oldest occurences known of "malandrino".
There you can find an example of usage from Bartolomeo da San Concordio (Pisa, 1262 - 1347) (see ...
- 38.6k
5
votes
Why is the family name of the House of Medici written as 'de' Medici' not 'dei Medici'?
The word de' you have found is a truncated version of "preposizione articolata" dei.
Section IV.80 of the book Italiano by Luca Serianni gives detailed information about the truncated versions of ...
- 38.6k
5
votes
16th-century character
If we look at the first page of the “Prohemio” (modern Italian, “Proemio”), we see
which shows some peculiarities. The most prominent is the usage of “&” instead of et. But we also see usages of “...
- 17.9k
5
votes
Accepted
Sign languages spoken in Italy
As you can see from Wikipedia, the sign language used in Italy is called "lingua dei segni italiana". You can find more information about this sign language at these Wikipedia articles:
https://en....
- 38.6k
5
votes
Etymology of conjugation 2-person singular
Many Classic Latin words end with a consonant, mostly -m, -t and -s. While in Florentine generally the final -m and -t have disappeared, most words in -s have seen their final vowel changed due a ...
- 151
5
votes
Italianizzazione delle parole durante il fascismo
Un’altra parola forzatamente italianizzata in quel periodo era il cachet (equivalente della nostra attuale aspirina) che era tradotto come cialdino.
In questo articolo ho trovato anche i riferimenti ...
- 20.3k
5
votes
Accepted
Is this a correct rendering of some fourteenth-century Italian writing in modern orthography?
First of all, congratulations for your great background work and your interpretation, even more so since you don't know well Italian. I'm quite sure that nobody here is even remotely as knowledgeable ...
- 36.4k
4
votes
Is "Cafeé und Thée Logia" partly Italian?
The only occurrence I could find of a spelling similar to cafeé in an Italian text is caveè, in a report by 16th-century cardinal and ambassador Gianfrancesco Morosini, as quoted in Le relazioni degli ...
- 36.4k
4
votes
Accepted
Perché non si può usare la forma dell'imperativo della seconda persona singolare con una negazione?
Premetto di non essere un linguista, ma potrebbe derivare dal latino noli, imperativo seconda persona singolare del verbo nolo ("non volere"). In latino, noli richiede l'infinito alla ...
- 491
4
votes
Accepted
Does the noun "pazzo" come from Pazzi conspiracy?
On the De Mauro dictionary, the term “pazzo” is dated 1280.
There is an example in Boccaccio reported by the “Grande dizionario della lingua italiana”:
Boccaccio, VIII-2-27: Per questo, creden...
- 17.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Espressioni dialettali toscane sul prestare denaro
Sulla pagina 609 dell'Ottocentesco Nuovo elenco di voci e maniere di dire biasimate e di altre che sembrano di buona ragione e mancano ne' vocabolarj italiani, compilato da Lorenzo Molossi, si trovano ...
- 38.6k
4
votes
Accepted
Perché i Fucilieri di Marina si chiamano Marò?
Si trova qualche informazione nel libro Ricerche linguistiche balcanico-danubiane di Giovan Battista Pellegrini (La Fenice Edizioni, 1992). In una discussione sull'etimologia di mòro, si menziona ...
- 38.6k
3
votes
It's very uncommon for Italian words to end in consonants, but vast number of Latin words do. Why?
How did the same population who a few centuries ago used to speak
Latin with all its consonant-endings manage to lose not one or two but
all of them in the derived language?
I think there is a ...
- 31
3
votes
Parola di origine giapponese che è entrata per prima nella lingua italiana
Lo metto come risposta, anche se so che andrà integrata da altre.
Paolo Zolli, in Le parole straniere (Zanichelli 1976, quindi non recentissimo), parlando alle pp. 103-4 dei nipponismi, scrive:
...
- 36.4k
3
votes
How old is the Italian word "malandrino"?
The Zingarelli Italian (monolingual) dictionary (behind a paywall) gives for each lemma a more or less approximate year for its first known occurrence. For malandrino, it gives “av. 1347”, that is, ...
- 36.4k
3
votes
Is the expression "arco di Noè" (used in Sicily for "rainbow") related to "L'arca di Noè"?
Given its superficial similarity and that all examples of its use on Google Books appear to be from Sicilian authors, it seems that Arco di Noè clearly derives from the Sicilian arcu di Nuè.
...
- 846
3
votes
Books on the evolution of Latin into Italian?
Another interesting book is Manuale di linguistica e filologia romanza (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2003, 3rd edition from 2009 in the link) by Lorenzo Renzi and Alvise Andreose, which covers the evolution ...
- 38.6k
2
votes
Accepted
"Possesso del buono" in a XVIIth century sentence
First your sentence is incomplete, I'll do my best to guess how it should continue (because the translation might depend on that). I think
The paths to reach mastery in Painting are so different [.....
- 12.1k
2
votes
Illica vs. Today's Language
No that is completely false. While the language is clearly poetic (and so a little "harder" than everyday conversation) and from 150 to 100 years old, it is not substantially different from standard ...
- 12.1k
2
votes
Origini dell'interiezione "Ammàzza!"
Nella consulenza linguistica dell'Accademia della Crusca si trova un articolo sull'origine dell'interiezione ammazza e altre espressioni simili di Paolo D'Achille e Anna M. Thornton.
Si comincia ...
- 38.6k
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