Dal latino all’italiano: una storia di parole

Abstract

This essay offers an overview of the relationships that connect the Italian and Latin lexicon, highlighting the peculiarity of the Italian language in the context of Romance languages. The phonological proximity of Tuscan to Latin has favored the insertion of a vast number of learned words, creating a latinization of the Italian lexicon to an extent that is greater than for any other Romance language. In the formation processes of the Italian language, the influx of learned words played a role no less important than that played by the entry of popular words. Hereditary words are more rooted in areas of daily life and material culture; Latinisms have left a greater imprint on the abstract intellectual lexicon and have been of fundamental importance in the constitution of an international scientific lexicon, but they also deeply pervade the basic vocabulary. The language of ancient Rome has left its mark on the European lexicon because it was also the medium for introducing a conspicuous number of Greek words into Romance and non-Romance languages. Within Italian language, popular words and learned words are not two rigidly separated blocks: the linguistic reality, in fact, turns out to be more complex than these schematic distinctions because of the continuous relationship of interchange between the two nuclei traditionally identified with the learned and popular labels. The creation of a third category, that of half-learned words, only apparently solves the problem and confirms that the popular tradition and the learned tradition are clearly not separate channels. The essay highlights how the interweaving of words of different origin gives life in Italian to complex families of words, each of which presents a different story that is the result of crossings and migrations from one language to another. In particular, the study focuses on the analysis of a high number of allotropes, whose historical path, semantic development and phonetic evolution are outlined. Ample space is dedicated to the characters and phenomena of the Vulgar Latin lexicon: the loss of the less common synonyms, the disappearance of homophones, the replacement of short words with longer words or of generic words with specific and expressive words or of single words with syntagms, the substitution of diminutives for basic forms or frequentative and intensive verbs for simple verbs, semantic broadening and narrowing, and the coining of new verbs. A linguistic revolution of this magnitude was favored by the advent of Christianity: a religion that made the primacy of the least important person one of the cornerstones of its message, and which therefore operated a complete reversal of the social hierarchy could not fail to adopt a sermo humilis that was close to the language of the people and was thus easily understood by the faithful masses. The influence of Christianity is investigated through the examination of three guiding threads: Hebrew words that entered Christian Latin through Greek; words of Christian Latin derived from Greek; and semantic changes in Christian Latin. In this excursus the contribution of Latin to Italian is observed through the visual angle of words, of which historical events are reconstructed in an imaginary journey from the past to the present.