INTERNATIONALISMS, ANGLO-LATINISMS AND OTHER KINSHIP TIES BETWEEN ITALIAN AND ENGLISH
INTERNATIONALISMS, ANGLO-LATINISMS AND OTHER KINSHIP TIES BETWEEN ITALIAN AND ENGLISH

Summary/Abstract: In the analysis of language contact and borrowing, the category of internationalism denotes lexical items that are formally and semantically similar across unrelated languages, mainly of neo-classical origin. Internationalisms are characteristically unmarked for a specific national provenance, like the pair En electricity / It elettricità. On the other hand, many similar examples, such as En romantic and It romantico, are the result of borrowings from English into Italian, a fact that can be established only on historical grounds, because the word itself does not reveal any trace of foreignness to the lay Italian speaker, being Italian a Latin-based language. In this paper, the lexical category of internationalism will be defined and set apart from other outcomes of language contact, like direct and indirect Anglicisms, Anglo-Latinisms, and other forms of linguistic kinship between these two, partly unrelated, European languages.

• Details
• Contents