If you like Italian, you will surely know that
this language and most of its words come from Latin.
However, let's take this phrase (very natural, and which we say every day): as a joke,
I stole a bench from the hotel, but the guard saw me and broke my shin. No
term in this beautiful sentence, beyond the grammatical ones and the verb to see,
is of Latin origin. This is because Italian has taken many words, even quite common ones,
from Germanic languages. Words like look, drive, lose, joke,
earn and many others are very ancient Germanisms - this is the topic of today's video.
Ah, and this is Podcast Italiano, a channel for those who learn or love the
Italian language. If you need it, you can turn on subtitles. If you learn Italian on my
website you will find the transcription of everything I will say in the video: the link is in the description.
The words I listed earlier, such as war, hotel and many others, were borrowed to us
, so to speak, from languages ​​of the Germanic family.
All the Barban languages ​​are part of this family ... descending from a common ancestor called Proto-Germanic.
Germanisms can be from any era, ancient or modern, but in this video we
will focus particularly on the ancient ones, which mostly date back to the Early
Middle Ages, because they tell us something interesting about the history of our country.
But let's start with the oldest ones of all, which date back to before the Middle Ages: they are the
Paleo-Germanisms. Nothing to do with dinosaurs and Jurassic Park (sorry, Elena): it is
a term used by some scholars to indicate Germanic words lent not to Italian,
but already to Latin, from which they then arrived in Italian . These ancestral Germanisms,
so to speak, are not very many: for example we have words like soap, yew and spade.
Every now and then, Germanic words were adopted to express a new concept, for which
there was not yet a word. It is the example of moose, lent to Latin by a Germanic culture which
evidently dealt with moose more often than the Romans. These are called borrowings of necessity,
precisely because in a certain sense they are necessary (or at least useful) to the target language,
which does not have a word to designate that concept.
The word spade, however, allows us to observe the opposite phenomenon, that is, luxury borrowing:
as the name already explains, this type of borrowing is not strictly necessary,
because a word for the concept in question would already exist in the target language ; however,
for a series of reasons, it is decided to adopt a foreign word and replace it with the
native one. For example, the Germanic word war replaces the Latin word bellum.
Among these very ancient Germanisms we also have blue, brown, ember,
stable and above all, the adorable marten. But look at her, isn't she adorable?
Well, but why were all these Germanic words adopted in
Latin first, and in Italian or, well, proto-Italian, proto-Romance varieties then?
Here we have to talk a little about the history of our country. Already during the Roman Empire,
there were numerous invasions by barbarian… ahem, Germanic peoples,
which generated contact between the Roman people and that of the invaders;
and contact between peoples also means contact between languages, and therefore linguistic interference,
and therefore borrowing. It's like when an Italian goes to England for three months
and comes back putting anglicisms in every sentence he says. And then there were not only invasions,
but also trade and other types of interactions. Finally, gradually,
the units made up of Germanic soldiers became increasingly larger in the Roman army.
And after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Germanic peoples settled permanently
in central-southern Europe; and, in particular, in Italy there were centuries
of invasions and even Germanic kingdoms. In particular, we talk about Ostrogoths,
Lombards and Franks. This explains our great linguistic interference. Consider that
the Ostrogoths (i.e. the eastern Goths; because the Visigoths were the western Goths) began
to reign in Italy at the end of the 5th century AD, and lost power towards the middle of the 6th,
then merging, over time, with the local population. At this point,
the entire Italian territory was under the dominion of the Germanic peoples. The Lombards, meanwhile,
entered Italy around the middle of the 6th century and began to conquer it, although they never
managed to obtain the entire territory. When the increasingly powerful Lombard kings
arrived in Rome in the 8th century, the popes turned to the Franks, another Germanic people,
who were becoming the great European power of the time. Thus, from 774 AD, the Franks took
control of the former Lombard Kingdom, led by a certain Charlemagne (maybe you know him);
but, unlike the two previous cases, there is no mass migration towards the boot.
Even though we have a lot of information about this historical period, it is not always easy
to understand whether a certain Germanic word came to us from the Ostrogoths, the Lombards or the Franks,
given that in any case they were all Germanic languages ​​related to each other. For
example, truce could come from the Gothic triggwa, the Franconian triuwa or the Longoboard trewwa:
and it is also possible that it was a mixture of different Germanic words. Scholars
are often unsure. What we can say with certainty, however, is that
we have received quite a few words from these peoples: from the Lombards alone, almost three hundred,
according to some estimates. Among these, for example, those that Barbero reminds us of.
They are Lombard words war, brawl, truce, feud, bar,
trap, in short they were quite violent people.
Over the centuries, Italian also borrows from what can
already be called German (though not modern German, of course). In fact,
contacts with "Germany" (which did not yet exist) continued intense for centuries:
for example, Central-Northern Italy was part of the Holy Roman Empire for a long time and
German mercenaries often fought in the Italian wars. Today, however,
I want to focus in particular on the most ancient Germanisms, those of the Early Middle Ages,
perhaps leaving the so-called Germanisms, that is, words that derive from German in different eras, for a future video
. But I want to say something about the word "German": why
do we have this strange adjective in Italian when in other languages ​​we say German, Allemand, Aleman?
The adjective German ultimately comes from a Gothic word, thiuda, which meant
"people" and is related to that Deutsch of Deutschland. So, friends, it's not that strange.
Good, but in practice how did these ancient Germanisms pass into Italian?
Apart from the fact that, as always, everything depends a lot on the historical moment,
because there was a long interaction between Italy and the Germanic peoples, we can say that the loanwords
coming from ancient Franconian (the language of the Franks) often entered late Latin (or, if we want,
in a proto-Romance state, when Latin was becoming Romance languages) often by written means,
through the language of the chancelleries (i.e. public offices that were responsible for drawing up documents;
in fact therefore the language of the bureaucracy) because the Franks they occupied precisely the
high-ranking environments, and were rather concerned with governing, rather than populating Italy en masse.
More often, however, the loans came orally from the Lombard language;
but it is also true that the Lombards, who came before the Franks, also
reigned in Italy, and in fact some words that have come down to us from the Lombard come
from the legal chancellery field: we have, for example, truce and feud.
We must not forget indirect loans. We have seen,
speaking of Paleogermanisms, that Latin has left us Germanic terms,
taken even before neo-Latin languages ​​such as Italian, French, Spanish,
Portuguese or Romanian were formed. We have also seen that late and medieval Latin,
through writing, indirectly left us many terms from Franconian. But there are other cases:
Old French, for example, left us many words that it had in turn taken
from Franconian. As we also saw in the video on Italianisms, words often make the rounds,
passing from one language to another: for example, if you remember, "baguette" is a Frenchism
common in many languages, but which French in turn took from the Italian “bacchetta”.
Ok, but what kind of words entered Italian?
Again, it all depends on the historical context and when
the term was borrowed. We can, however,
isolate some specific areas. For example, as you may have imagined by now,
we have received several terms related to the military world, such as war, guard and brawl.
There are many – this may surprise you – terms to indicate the parts of the body of humans and
animals: we have cheek, spleen, knuckle, shin, span and tusk. I really like zanna because in
modern German it is the same as the Lombard word from which the Italian one derives: zahn. In Italian,
however, zanna is used only for the particularly robust teeth of some animals, such as elephants. And
even spleen in German is very similar: milz. However, not because Italian took it from German,
but because Italian took it from Lombard, which was a Germanic language related to the
ancient language from which modern German descends. There is also strozza with the meaning of throat,
a term no longer used today, but which remains in the very common verb to strangle or choke.
I always find a good reason to strangle you! I'll choke you and I'll choke you again!
There are also many terms related to the house and domestic life:
balcony, mezzanine, bench, shelf, pillowcase and hanger among others.
Less common are legal and administrative words. Some, however, are
quite well known: for example the already mentioned truce and feud.
Finally, we have many concrete and expressive terms: grab, snore,
joke, stench (i.e. bad smell) and thud.
As you can see, the type of words that come from a certain people depends on their culture.
As Barbero says, speaking specifically of the Lombards, "they were not a society of philosophers".
We know that each language has its own set of sounds and its own way of putting them together;
thus, Japanese doesn't sound like Arabic, which doesn't sound like Italian, which in turn doesn't
sound like English. Can you imagine if we talk about things? 🙂 It is clear, therefore, that words, passing
from one language to another, will have to be adapted somewhat to the structures of the target language.
As previously mentioned, we are dealing in particular with very
ancient Germanisms; and the fact is interesting, because the ancient borrowings have been adapted
more heavily than the modern borrowings. If today we are used to foreign languages ​​and
obviously non-Italian words (like blitz or panzer) don't seem too strange to us, things
were once different. So let's see how these words were adapted and Italianized.
First of all, in the presence of a diphthong, it was often reduced to a single
vowel. So the Franconian rauba has become stuff, and raubon has instead
become stealing. Later, the Middle High German stainbock became ibex.
Another common phenomenon is epithesis, or in medical language the correction of a
defective limb... no, I got the wrong definition, I meant "phenomenon whereby
a sound is added, and in particular, in this case, a vowel, at the end of a word. Thus,
the Franconian bank (which indicated a seat along the walls of a house) gave bench
and bank (or bench), with the addition of o and a endings; from bosk (bush; and yes,
it is related to the English and German bush/Busch) we got wood; and from want
we got glove. As I said earlier, knowledge of foreign languages ​​was not widespread
centuries ago. Some would say that it isn't even today in Italy, but not me. Given that all
Italian words, with a few (few) exceptions, end with a vowel, the
average speaker did not feel at ease when faced with a word that ended with a consonant:
it simply did not come naturally (in a certain sense, it doesn't come so naturally even today:
which is why we pronounce fan or gol by adding a small final supporting vowel: fannə).
Furthermore, as we can observe from the example of Stainbock/ibex,
sometimes the last consonant was doubled,
and we do the same today: if you hear when I say fannə, double that n.
Then there is anaptyxis – again, no strange pathologies – whereby
a vowel was added to a series of consonants, because we Italians don't like too many consonants in a row.
Let's think of the landsknechts, the German mercenary soldiers who sometimes came to Italy and
who all Italian readers know thanks to The Betrothed. The original word in German is
Landsknecht, decidedly unpronounceable for an Italian: and therefore lanzichenecchi. Beautiful, is not it?
From the eighteenth century, however, knowledge of foreign languages ​​began to be more widespread,
and so the adaptation of loanwords became less burdensome and their foreign origin gradually
more evident, as in nickel, fuhrer or panzer. This is why I am especially interested
in ancient or medieval Germanisms, because they are completely camouflaged in the pile of Latin words.
Given that Germanisms arrived in Italian at different times,
and were not part of Italian (and Latin) for the entire history of these languages,
the normal process of evolution of words did not occur,
in particular as regards it's about sounds. Furthermore, Germanisms brought sequences
of sounds in unknown and sometimes even awkward to pronounce positions to Latin and Italian.
First of all, the intervocalic b of Latin, i.e. placed between vowels, became v, therefore the Latin
fabulam gave us fable, and the verb habere became to have (here I am referring to the words
that have been handed down orally for centuries; the cultured Latinisms , “recovered from books” are much
more similar to the original Latin form, as I explained in this video). Germanisms, however,
did not experience this change, so the Franconian rauba remained stuff,
rather than becoming rova, and the Gothic raubon remained steal.
Let's now look at one of the strongest indications of the Germanic origin of a word.
Be warned, this is interesting. The word-initial /gw/ sound did not exist in Latin:
it comes instead from the word-initial /w/ sound of Germanic loanwords. So
wardon became look, with the addition of the verb ending -are. And so from
warjan we got heal, again with initial /gw/, this time with -ire.
And again, we have warnjan, which meant to warn (Does it remind you of the English to warn?
Nice intuition, totally not driven by me: the two words are in fact related.)
and which to us gave garnish (once used mainly in a military sense ,
like "garnishing a city with weapons and ammunition", from which also the garrison, but which today is used
above all in the kitchen: "garnishing a dish with a side of potatoes"), and then obviously werra,
which gave us war, wida, who gave us guidance, the Franconian waidhanjan who gave us
gain or wai from which comes trouble. Like “woe betide you if you don't like this video”.
In short, almost all words that begin with /gw/ in Italian are Germanic. Almost,
not all. This mechanism was so widespread and common that it transformed /w/ into /gw/ even in
Latin words. From vadum, for example, precisely because of this mechanism, the form guado has come to us. Or from
the Latin… vāgīna (which in Latin was the sheath of a sword or in general a casing), is derived
guaìna (which today, however, is pronounced guàina, with the accent on the a) and always means sheath,
casing or membrane where… put something. Erm, you might be wondering… yes, vagina
obviously comes from the same Latin word, but it is a cultured word, recovered from books.
With that, we can conclude this journey. We have discovered that there is truly
a world of very ancient Germanic words that have arrived in Italian since Latin times
and then in all subsequent centuries; we just don't notice it, because they are
so camouflaged that today only experts (or you, after this video) can recognize
their non-Latin origin. Having said that, the Italian lexicon still remains predominantly
Latin. But what does this mean? You may be interested in this video about it.