WEBVTT 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:03.240 If you like Italian, you will surely know that 00:00:03.240 --> 00:00:07.640 this language and most of its words come from Latin. 00:00:07.640 --> 00:00:13.080 However, let's take this phrase (very natural, and which we say every day): as a joke, 00:00:13.080 --> 00:00:24.480 I stole a bench from the hotel, but the guard saw me and broke my shin. No 00:00:24.480 --> 00:00:29.240 term in this beautiful sentence, beyond the grammatical ones and the verb to see, 00:00:29.240 --> 00:00:35.840 is of Latin origin. This is because Italian has taken many words, even quite common ones, 00:00:35.840 --> 00:00:42.160 from Germanic languages. Words like look, drive, lose, joke, 00:00:42.160 --> 00:00:48.480 earn and many others are very ancient Germanisms - this is the topic of today's video. 00:00:48.480 --> 00:00:53.240 Ah, and this is Podcast Italiano, a channel for those who learn or love the 00:00:53.240 --> 00:00:58.120 Italian language. If you need it, you can turn on subtitles. If you learn Italian on my 00:00:58.120 --> 00:01:04.240 website you will find the transcription of everything I will say in the video: the link is in the description. 00:01:04.240 --> 00:01:10.280 The words I listed earlier, such as war, hotel and many others, were borrowed to us 00:01:10.280 --> 00:01:15.160 , so to speak, from languages ​​of the Germanic family. 00:01:15.160 --> 00:01:22.779 All the Barban languages ​​are part of this family ... descending from a common ancestor called Proto-Germanic. 00:01:22.779 --> 00:01:26.640 Germanisms can be from any era, ancient or modern, but in this video we 00:01:26.640 --> 00:01:31.960 will focus particularly on the ancient ones, which mostly date back to the Early 00:01:31.960 --> 00:01:37.000 Middle Ages, because they tell us something interesting about the history of our country. 00:01:37.000 --> 00:01:42.160 But let's start with the oldest ones of all, which date back to before the Middle Ages: they are the 00:01:42.160 --> 00:01:53.440 Paleo-Germanisms. Nothing to do with dinosaurs and Jurassic Park (sorry, Elena): it is 00:01:53.440 --> 00:01:59.280 a term used by some scholars to indicate Germanic words lent not to Italian, 00:01:59.280 --> 00:02:06.000 but already to Latin, from which they then arrived in Italian . These ancestral Germanisms, 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:12.920 so to speak, are not very many: for example we have words like soap, yew and spade. 00:02:12.920 --> 00:02:17.960 Every now and then, Germanic words were adopted to express a new concept, for which 00:02:17.960 --> 00:02:23.400 there was not yet a word. It is the example of moose, lent to Latin by a Germanic culture which 00:02:23.400 --> 00:02:29.840 evidently dealt with moose more often than the Romans. These are called borrowings of necessity, 00:02:30.400 --> 00:02:36.200 precisely because in a certain sense they are necessary (or at least useful) to the target language, 00:02:36.200 --> 00:02:39.160 which does not have a word to designate that concept. 00:02:39.160 --> 00:02:45.040 The word spade, however, allows us to observe the opposite phenomenon, that is, luxury borrowing: 00:02:45.040 --> 00:02:50.000 as the name already explains, this type of borrowing is not strictly necessary, 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:55.080 because a word for the concept in question would already exist in the target language ; however, 00:02:55.080 --> 00:03:00.400 for a series of reasons, it is decided to adopt a foreign word and replace it with the 00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:08.440 native one. For example, the Germanic word war replaces the Latin word bellum. 00:03:08.440 --> 00:03:13.440 Among these very ancient Germanisms we also have blue, brown, ember, 00:03:13.440 --> 00:03:19.440 stable and above all, the adorable marten. But look at her, isn't she adorable? 00:03:19.440 --> 00:03:24.000 Well, but why were all these Germanic words adopted in 00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:30.800 Latin first, and in Italian or, well, proto-Italian, proto-Romance varieties then? 00:03:30.800 --> 00:03:35.280 Here we have to talk a little about the history of our country. Already during the Roman Empire, 00:03:35.280 --> 00:03:39.640 there were numerous invasions by barbarian… ahem, Germanic peoples, 00:03:39.640 --> 00:03:43.560 which generated contact between the Roman people and that of the invaders; 00:03:43.560 --> 00:03:49.840 and contact between peoples also means contact between languages, and therefore linguistic interference, 00:03:49.840 --> 00:03:54.440 and therefore borrowing. It's like when an Italian goes to England for three months 00:03:54.440 --> 00:03:59.720 and comes back putting anglicisms in every sentence he says. And then there were not only invasions, 00:04:00.280 --> 00:04:05.200 but also trade and other types of interactions. Finally, gradually, 00:04:05.200 --> 00:04:10.200 the units made up of Germanic soldiers became increasingly larger in the Roman army. 00:04:10.200 --> 00:04:15.840 And after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Germanic peoples settled permanently 00:04:15.840 --> 00:04:20.280 in central-southern Europe; and, in particular, in Italy there were centuries 00:04:20.280 --> 00:04:27.000 of invasions and even Germanic kingdoms. In particular, we talk about Ostrogoths, 00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:33.920 Lombards and Franks. This explains our great linguistic interference. Consider that 00:04:33.920 --> 00:04:40.280 the Ostrogoths (i.e. the eastern Goths; because the Visigoths were the western Goths) began 00:04:40.280 --> 00:04:46.680 to reign in Italy at the end of the 5th century AD, and lost power towards the middle of the 6th, 00:04:46.680 --> 00:04:51.120 then merging, over time, with the local population. At this point, 00:04:51.120 --> 00:04:56.240 the entire Italian territory was under the dominion of the Germanic peoples. The Lombards, meanwhile, 00:04:56.240 --> 00:05:01.600 entered Italy around the middle of the 6th century and began to conquer it, although they never 00:05:01.600 --> 00:05:06.840 managed to obtain the entire territory. When the increasingly powerful Lombard kings 00:05:06.840 --> 00:05:13.240 arrived in Rome in the 8th century, the popes turned to the Franks, another Germanic people, 00:05:13.240 --> 00:05:21.720 who were becoming the great European power of the time. Thus, from 774 AD, the Franks took 00:05:21.720 --> 00:05:28.160 control of the former Lombard Kingdom, led by a certain Charlemagne (maybe you know him); 00:05:28.160 --> 00:05:33.680 but, unlike the two previous cases, there is no mass migration towards the boot. 00:05:33.680 --> 00:05:38.480 Even though we have a lot of information about this historical period, it is not always easy 00:05:38.480 --> 00:05:44.600 to understand whether a certain Germanic word came to us from the Ostrogoths, the Lombards or the Franks, 00:05:44.600 --> 00:05:48.800 given that in any case they were all Germanic languages ​​related to each other. For 00:05:48.800 --> 00:05:56.240 example, truce could come from the Gothic triggwa, the Franconian triuwa or the Longoboard trewwa: 00:05:56.240 --> 00:06:02.480 and it is also possible that it was a mixture of different Germanic words. Scholars 00:06:02.480 --> 00:06:06.360 are often unsure. What we can say with certainty, however, is that 00:06:06.360 --> 00:06:11.760 we have received quite a few words from these peoples: from the Lombards alone, almost three hundred, 00:06:11.760 --> 00:06:15.600 according to some estimates. Among these, for example, those that Barbero reminds us of. 00:06:15.600 --> 00:06:22.440 They are Lombard words war, brawl, truce, feud, bar, 00:06:22.440 --> 00:06:25.640 trap, in short they were quite violent people. 00:06:25.640 --> 00:06:29.680 Over the centuries, Italian also borrows from what can 00:06:29.680 --> 00:06:35.040 already be called German (though not modern German, of course). In fact, 00:06:35.040 --> 00:06:40.120 contacts with "Germany" (which did not yet exist) continued intense for centuries: 00:06:40.120 --> 00:06:44.640 for example, Central-Northern Italy was part of the Holy Roman Empire for a long time and 00:06:44.640 --> 00:06:48.800 German mercenaries often fought in the Italian wars. Today, however, 00:06:48.800 --> 00:06:54.280 I want to focus in particular on the most ancient Germanisms, those of the Early Middle Ages, 00:06:54.280 --> 00:07:00.080 perhaps leaving the so-called Germanisms, that is, words that derive from German in different eras, for a future video 00:07:00.080 --> 00:07:05.000 . But I want to say something about the word "German": why 00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:12.960 do we have this strange adjective in Italian when in other languages ​​we say German, Allemand, Aleman? 00:07:12.960 --> 00:07:19.200 The adjective German ultimately comes from a Gothic word, thiuda, which meant 00:07:19.200 --> 00:07:26.200 "people" and is related to that Deutsch of Deutschland. So, friends, it's not that strange. 00:07:26.200 --> 00:07:30.680 Good, but in practice how did these ancient Germanisms pass into Italian? 00:07:30.680 --> 00:07:34.920 Apart from the fact that, as always, everything depends a lot on the historical moment, 00:07:34.920 --> 00:07:41.040 because there was a long interaction between Italy and the Germanic peoples, we can say that the loanwords 00:07:41.040 --> 00:07:46.480 coming from ancient Franconian (the language of the Franks) often entered late Latin (or, if we want, 00:07:46.480 --> 00:07:53.480 in a proto-Romance state, when Latin was becoming Romance languages) often by written means, 00:07:53.480 --> 00:07:59.000 through the language of the chancelleries (i.e. public offices that were responsible for drawing up documents; 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:03.880 in fact therefore the language of the bureaucracy) because the Franks they occupied precisely the 00:08:03.880 --> 00:08:10.240 high-ranking environments, and were rather concerned with governing, rather than populating Italy en masse. 00:08:10.240 --> 00:08:14.880 More often, however, the loans came orally from the Lombard language; 00:08:14.880 --> 00:08:18.960 but it is also true that the Lombards, who came before the Franks, also 00:08:18.960 --> 00:08:23.640 reigned in Italy, and in fact some words that have come down to us from the Lombard come 00:08:23.640 --> 00:08:29.080 from the legal chancellery field: we have, for example, truce and feud. 00:08:29.080 --> 00:08:32.760 We must not forget indirect loans. We have seen, 00:08:32.760 --> 00:08:38.280 speaking of Paleogermanisms, that Latin has left us Germanic terms, 00:08:38.280 --> 00:08:43.240 taken even before neo-Latin languages ​​such as Italian, French, Spanish, 00:08:43.240 --> 00:08:48.160 Portuguese or Romanian were formed. We have also seen that late and medieval Latin, 00:08:48.160 --> 00:08:54.040 through writing, indirectly left us many terms from Franconian. But there are other cases: 00:08:54.040 --> 00:08:59.400 Old French, for example, left us many words that it had in turn taken 00:08:59.400 --> 00:09:04.640 from Franconian. As we also saw in the video on Italianisms, words often make the rounds, 00:09:04.640 --> 00:09:09.880 passing from one language to another: for example, if you remember, "baguette" is a Frenchism 00:09:09.880 --> 00:09:14.800 common in many languages, but which French in turn took from the Italian “bacchetta”. 00:09:14.800 --> 00:09:17.440 Ok, but what kind of words entered Italian? 00:09:17.440 --> 00:09:21.480 Again, it all depends on the historical context and when 00:09:21.480 --> 00:09:24.640 the term was borrowed. We can, however, 00:09:24.640 --> 00:09:28.600 isolate some specific areas. For example, as you may have imagined by now, 00:09:28.600 --> 00:09:35.520 we have received several terms related to the military world, such as war, guard and brawl. 00:09:35.520 --> 00:09:41.000 There are many – this may surprise you – terms to indicate the parts of the body of humans and 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:50.560 animals: we have cheek, spleen, knuckle, shin, span and tusk. I really like zanna because in 00:09:50.560 --> 00:09:57.040 modern German it is the same as the Lombard word from which the Italian one derives: zahn. In Italian, 00:09:57.040 --> 00:10:02.840 however, zanna is used only for the particularly robust teeth of some animals, such as elephants. And 00:10:02.840 --> 00:10:10.120 even spleen in German is very similar: milz. However, not because Italian took it from German, 00:10:10.120 --> 00:10:15.440 but because Italian took it from Lombard, which was a Germanic language related to the 00:10:15.440 --> 00:10:21.760 ancient language from which modern German descends. There is also strozza with the meaning of throat, 00:10:21.760 --> 00:10:28.191 a term no longer used today, but which remains in the very common verb to strangle or choke. 00:10:28.191 --> 00:10:32.760 I always find a good reason to strangle you! I'll choke you and I'll choke you again! 00:10:32.760 --> 00:10:36.920 There are also many terms related to the house and domestic life: 00:10:36.920 --> 00:10:44.440 balcony, mezzanine, bench, shelf, pillowcase and hanger among others. 00:10:44.440 --> 00:10:48.040 Less common are legal and administrative words. Some, however, are 00:10:48.040 --> 00:10:52.280 quite well known: for example the already mentioned truce and feud. 00:10:52.280 --> 00:10:57.680 Finally, we have many concrete and expressive terms: grab, snore, 00:10:57.680 --> 00:11:02.160 joke, stench (i.e. bad smell) and thud. 00:11:02.160 --> 00:11:07.600 As you can see, the type of words that come from a certain people depends on their culture. 00:11:07.600 --> 00:11:12.240 As Barbero says, speaking specifically of the Lombards, "they were not a society of philosophers". 00:11:12.240 --> 00:11:16.720 We know that each language has its own set of sounds and its own way of putting them together; 00:11:16.720 --> 00:11:20.920 thus, Japanese doesn't sound like Arabic, which doesn't sound like Italian, which in turn doesn't 00:11:20.920 --> 00:11:26.880 sound like English. Can you imagine if we talk about things? 🙂 It is clear, therefore, that words, passing 00:11:26.880 --> 00:11:31.840 from one language to another, will have to be adapted somewhat to the structures of the target language. 00:11:31.840 --> 00:11:36.680 As previously mentioned, we are dealing in particular with very 00:11:36.680 --> 00:11:42.360 ancient Germanisms; and the fact is interesting, because the ancient borrowings have been adapted 00:11:42.360 --> 00:11:48.080 more heavily than the modern borrowings. If today we are used to foreign languages ​​and 00:11:48.080 --> 00:11:54.960 obviously non-Italian words (like blitz or panzer) don't seem too strange to us, things 00:11:54.960 --> 00:12:00.760 were once different. So let's see how these words were adapted and Italianized. 00:12:00.760 --> 00:12:05.560 First of all, in the presence of a diphthong, it was often reduced to a single 00:12:05.560 --> 00:12:11.440 vowel. So the Franconian rauba has become stuff, and raubon has instead 00:12:11.440 --> 00:12:17.680 become stealing. Later, the Middle High German stainbock became ibex. 00:12:17.680 --> 00:12:23.680 Another common phenomenon is epithesis, or in medical language the correction of a 00:12:23.680 --> 00:12:29.280 defective limb... no, I got the wrong definition, I meant "phenomenon whereby 00:12:29.280 --> 00:12:33.920 a sound is added, and in particular, in this case, a vowel, at the end of a word. Thus, 00:12:33.920 --> 00:12:39.480 the Franconian bank (which indicated a seat along the walls of a house) gave bench 00:12:39.480 --> 00:12:46.160 and bank (or bench), with the addition of o and a endings; from bosk (bush; and yes, 00:12:46.160 --> 00:12:52.480 it is related to the English and German bush/Busch) we got wood; and from want 00:12:52.480 --> 00:12:58.320 we got glove. As I said earlier, knowledge of foreign languages ​​was not widespread 00:12:58.320 --> 00:13:03.520 centuries ago. Some would say that it isn't even today in Italy, but not me. Given that all 00:13:03.520 --> 00:13:09.720 Italian words, with a few (few) exceptions, end with a vowel, the 00:13:09.720 --> 00:13:14.400 average speaker did not feel at ease when faced with a word that ended with a consonant: 00:13:14.400 --> 00:13:18.640 it simply did not come naturally (in a certain sense, it doesn't come so naturally even today: 00:13:18.640 --> 00:13:25.520 which is why we pronounce fan or gol by adding a small final supporting vowel: fannə). 00:13:25.520 --> 00:13:29.600 Furthermore, as we can observe from the example of Stainbock/ibex, 00:13:29.600 --> 00:13:32.320 sometimes the last consonant was doubled, 00:13:32.320 --> 00:13:37.000 and we do the same today: if you hear when I say fannə, double that n. 00:13:37.000 --> 00:13:42.520 Then there is anaptyxis – again, no strange pathologies – whereby 00:13:42.520 --> 00:13:47.720 a vowel was added to a series of consonants, because we Italians don't like too many consonants in a row. 00:13:47.720 --> 00:13:53.520 Let's think of the landsknechts, the German mercenary soldiers who sometimes came to Italy and 00:13:53.520 --> 00:13:58.720 who all Italian readers know thanks to The Betrothed. The original word in German is 00:13:58.720 --> 00:14:06.520 Landsknecht, decidedly unpronounceable for an Italian: and therefore lanzichenecchi. Beautiful, is not it? 00:14:06.520 --> 00:14:11.200 From the eighteenth century, however, knowledge of foreign languages ​​began to be more widespread, 00:14:11.200 --> 00:14:16.800 and so the adaptation of loanwords became less burdensome and their foreign origin gradually 00:14:16.800 --> 00:14:22.400 more evident, as in nickel, fuhrer or panzer. This is why I am especially interested 00:14:22.400 --> 00:14:29.760 in ancient or medieval Germanisms, because they are completely camouflaged in the pile of Latin words. 00:14:29.760 --> 00:14:33.680 Given that Germanisms arrived in Italian at different times, 00:14:33.680 --> 00:14:38.960 and were not part of Italian (and Latin) for the entire history of these languages, 00:14:38.960 --> 00:14:43.360 the normal process of evolution of words did not occur, 00:14:43.360 --> 00:14:48.880 in particular as regards it's about sounds. Furthermore, Germanisms brought sequences 00:14:48.880 --> 00:14:55.160 of sounds in unknown and sometimes even awkward to pronounce positions to Latin and Italian. 00:14:55.160 --> 00:15:01.760 First of all, the intervocalic b of Latin, i.e. placed between vowels, became v, therefore the Latin 00:15:01.760 --> 00:15:12.559 fabulam gave us fable, and the verb habere became to have (here I am referring to the words 00:15:12.559 --> 00:15:15.080 that have been handed down orally for centuries; the cultured Latinisms , “recovered from books” are much 00:15:15.080 --> 00:15:20.760 more similar to the original Latin form, as I explained in this video). Germanisms, however, 00:15:20.760 --> 00:15:25.120 did not experience this change, so the Franconian rauba remained stuff, 00:15:25.120 --> 00:15:30.280 rather than becoming rova, and the Gothic raubon remained steal. 00:15:30.280 --> 00:15:35.160 Let's now look at one of the strongest indications of the Germanic origin of a word. 00:15:35.160 --> 00:15:41.120 Be warned, this is interesting. The word-initial /gw/ sound did not exist in Latin: 00:15:41.120 --> 00:15:45.720 it comes instead from the word-initial /w/ sound of Germanic loanwords. So 00:15:45.720 --> 00:15:52.560 wardon became look, with the addition of the verb ending -are. And so from 00:15:52.560 --> 00:15:58.080 warjan we got heal, again with initial /gw/, this time with -ire. 00:15:58.080 --> 00:16:03.800 And again, we have warnjan, which meant to warn (Does it remind you of the English to warn? 00:16:03.800 --> 00:16:08.760 Nice intuition, totally not driven by me: the two words are in fact related.) 00:16:08.760 --> 00:16:14.440 and which to us gave garnish (once used mainly in a military sense , 00:16:14.440 --> 00:16:20.760 like "garnishing a city with weapons and ammunition", from which also the garrison, but which today is used 00:16:20.760 --> 00:16:26.480 above all in the kitchen: "garnishing a dish with a side of potatoes"), and then obviously werra, 00:16:26.480 --> 00:16:32.400 which gave us war, wida, who gave us guidance, the Franconian waidhanjan who gave us 00:16:32.400 --> 00:16:39.600 gain or wai from which comes trouble. Like “woe betide you if you don't like this video”. 00:16:39.600 --> 00:16:45.360 In short, almost all words that begin with /gw/ in Italian are Germanic. Almost, 00:16:45.360 --> 00:16:52.240 not all. This mechanism was so widespread and common that it transformed /w/ into /gw/ even in 00:16:52.240 --> 00:16:58.960 Latin words. From vadum, for example, precisely because of this mechanism, the form guado has come to us. Or from 00:16:58.960 --> 00:17:05.760 the Latin… vāgīna (which in Latin was the sheath of a sword or in general a casing), is derived 00:17:05.760 --> 00:17:12.520 guaìna (which today, however, is pronounced guàina, with the accent on the a) and always means sheath, 00:17:12.520 --> 00:17:19.120 casing or membrane where… put something. Erm, you might be wondering… yes, vagina 00:17:19.120 --> 00:17:25.080 obviously comes from the same Latin word, but it is a cultured word, recovered from books. 00:17:25.080 --> 00:17:29.160 With that, we can conclude this journey. We have discovered that there is truly 00:17:29.160 --> 00:17:34.040 a world of very ancient Germanic words that have arrived in Italian since Latin times 00:17:34.040 --> 00:17:38.240 and then in all subsequent centuries; we just don't notice it, because they are 00:17:38.240 --> 00:17:44.320 so camouflaged that today only experts (or you, after this video) can recognize 00:17:44.320 --> 00:17:49.760 their non-Latin origin. Having said that, the Italian lexicon still remains predominantly 00:17:49.760 --> 00:17:58.840 Latin. But what does this mean? You may be interested in this video about it.