History of the project
The Osservatorio degli Italianismi nel Mondo (OIM) is a large-scale
project to build a data-base comprising all the Italian words that have
entered other languages, whether modified or not. The starting point has
been the Dizionario di italianismi in inglese, francese e
tedesco (DIFIT), published by Harro Stammerjohann in 2008, where over 4,400 entries record
Italian words followed by the form they have taken in English, French
and German, and giving their date of first occurrence, where
possible.
In 2004 Luca Serianni was commissioned by the UTET publishing house
to lead a project to compile Italian loanwords used in about 80
different languages. When he invited me to join I felt that I could not
say no, although I knew that it would be a formidable task. For some
years, I had been intrigued by a sentence in Joseph Aquilina’s forward
to his Maltese-English Dictionary (MED) where he stated that a
“detailed study of comparative lexicography” would show “a preponderance
of Romance lexemes” (1987: xv). In 1990-91 the Department of Maltese
entrusted me with a BA course on the Romance element in the Maltese
language. I took the opportunity to propose an original assignment
consisting of the etymological analysis of the 41,016 words registered
in the MED, fairly distributed among about 30 students. That pilot
project failed to prove Aquilina’s intuition right because we only
counted the headwords, ignoring the derived or cognate forms included
under it. Therefore we missed recording more than 5,000 words. I
published the results in a festschrift for Reinhold Kontzi (Brincat
1996: 115), showing that, out of the words registered in MED, 14,867 are
of Arabic origin (42.85%) and 14,650 are of Sicilian and Italian origin
(42.22%).
A more reliable table was drawn up after I repeated the exercise in
the 1990s with small groups of students reading Italian Honours, where I
adopted more accurate criteria which took into account all the lemmas in
capital letters, thus retrieving the words that had been lost. Besides,
the fact that I had only five students working on small sections every
year, spread over a number of years, meant that I could supervise their
work more closely and counter-check it. Here the figures turned out to
be 13,293 words of Arabic origin (32.41%), and 21,481 words of Sicilian
and Italian origin (52.36%) out of the total 41,016 lemmas (Brincat
2021: 411). The words of Sicilian and Italian origin were later copied
from the hand written sheets to Excel and became the basis for my part
of the OIM project when the Accademia della Crusca took over the
discontinued UTET project in 2014. On the initiative of Luca Serianni
and under the direction of Matthias Heinz and Lucilla Pizzoli groups of
collaborators were formed and seminars were held annually to explain the
aims and methodology of the project. Work on Castilian, Catalan and
Portuguese is now concluded, whereas research on Macedonian, Maltese,
Modern Greek, Polish and Hungarian, as well as on countries outside
Europe like the USA, Canada, China and Japan, is still underway. Each
word is described phonetically, morphologically and semantically, and
all divergences from the Italian are explained. Note is taken of usage
(whether current or obsolete), connotation (normal, formal, or
disparaging) and the domain to which the term belongs.
Evidently Maltese contains far more Romance lexemes than the other
languages in the study, because Sicilian and Italian are not simply
sources of loanwords but constitute a large part of the lexicon across
all domains. When the project is concluded we will be able to compare
the variety of domains in Maltese with that of other languages. At
present we must be content with the only table that is readily
available, that of the Italian words adopted in German. In a personal
communication Matthias Heinz informs me that DIFIT shows a strong bias
towards musical terms (30.33%), followed by economy/commerce/finance
(7.28%), gastronomy (6.37%), art and architecture (4.42%), navigation
(3.72%) and military terms (3.17%). A table of the domains to which
Maltese terms of Sicilian and Italian origin belong will be very
different because, although high-domain terms will be amply represented
(legal, medical, religious, cultural), it will also contain a lot of
fundamental vocabulary that is used in everyday life (the home, work,
the human body) and in the arts and crafts (fishing, carpentry,
building, and agriculture).
With the help of five steady collaborators (Joseph Chircop, Antoine
Camilleri, Ivan Said, Anna Vella, Sandro Caruana, and Davide Basaldella)
8,000 lemmas have been covered in three years, covering the letters A,
B, Ċ, D, E, F, L, N, P, U, Z, but there are still over 10,000 to go.
Besides my own letters I have to validate every scheda filled in by my
collaborators, in order to ensure homogeneity and to consult reference
works that are not available to them. Taking Aquilina’s Maltese-English
Dictionary (1987–1990) as the basis for our work was indisputable, but
this does not mean that everything is plain sailing. Although some
lemmas are straightforward, like furketta, kantant,
and mużika, difficulties do crop up. Joseph Aquilina rightly
deserves the country’s gratitude for taking on a mammoth task in the
mid-twentieth century, but by today’s standards one meets methodological
shortcomings. The first issue is the absence of the IPA transcription.
Maltese readers take the correct pronunciation for granted, but
foreigners are often perplexed on where to put the accent:
centìmetru/centimétru,
estensìmetru/estensimétru,
perìjodu/perjòdu,
karàmbola/karambòla. Secondly, Aquilina’s sources were
limited to those available when he was compiling his dictionary, over 50
years ago. Nowadays we have more reliable sources for Sicilian: the
Vocabolario Siciliano of Piccitto-Tropea-Trovato (1977–2002;
henceforth: VS); as well as the publications of the Atlante
Linguistico della Sicilia (42 volumes since 1995, ongoing). For
Italian we have Tullio De Mauro’s Grande Dizionario Italiano
dell’Uso (2000; GRADIT) with 250,000 entries in 7 volumes.
Case studies
The most serious problem concerning entries in the MED is the fact
that in most cases only the English equivalent is given, as can be seen
in these few examples.
On looking up LOKALIŻMU one only finds the English equivalent
‘localism’ but the Collins English Dictionary (CED) gives three meanings:
1. the policy of devolving power from a central or
federal government to local bodies; 2. a pronunciation,
phrase, etc, peculiar to a particular locality; 3.
another word for provincialism.
Does Maltese usage cover all three? To give the Maltese meaning in
Italian one must look up De Mauro’s GRADIT where one also finds three
meanings:
1a TS ling. teoria secondo cui tutti i
casi della declinazione delle lingue indoeuropee avrebbero avuto in
origine una funzione locale; 1b TS ling. elemento
proprio di un’area linguistica circoscritta all’interno di una più ampia
realtà linguistica; 2 TS polit. tendenza a impostare e
risolvere i problemi di natura politica o economica a vantaggio di
determinate aree geografiche, senza tenere conto di interessi più
generali
The task involves identifying those meanings that are shared with
Maltese, and describing those that diverge.
Considering that the Maltese language adopted words of Latin origin
from Italian much earlier than from English, one cannot exclude words
that now seem to be obsolete or might still be in circulation in certain
domains. Very often one has to look up Erin Serracino Inglott’s
Miklem (1975–1989) where explanatory definitions are given, but
in this case one finds LOK, LOKAL, LOKALI, LOKALIZZAR, LOKALIZZAT,
LOKALIZZAZZJONI, LOKATARJU, LOKAZJONI and LOKI, but lokaliżmu
is not there. In such cases one turns to the Korpus Malti
which is very useful because it is based on actual (written) usage and
it gives the word in context, quoting whole phrases or sentences taken
from literary works or newspapers. The lexeme lokaliżmu shows
five quotations, but only one has a clear meaning, presented as an
antonym of universaliżmu (kulturali). Two examples use it in an
economic context, somewhat like ‘protectionism’, and another two are
identical and use it in a sports context.
The word POSTA is given three headwords in MED. POSTA¹ gives two
different meanings, ‘post office’ and ‘mail’ (which are not numbered 1
and 2); POSTA² has six numbered meanings:
1. market stall; 2. bird’s nest;
3. bees’ nest; 4. a large flat block
of stone; 5. one of every four stones on which a
walking mill stands; 6. a patch of sea abounding in
fish.
The CED is only useful in the sense of ‘mail’ and for the verb ‘to
post’ (IMPOSTA). On the contrary GRADIT registers 14 different meanings
under posta¹, where 1 has a,
b, c, d; 3 has a,
b, c, d, e, f,;
4 has a, b, c, and
6 has a, b, c. Only
1 a, b, c, d,
‘ufficio postale’, ‘servizio postale’, ‘corrispondenza’;
3 d ‘spazio occupato dai venditori ambulanti
durante i mercati’ and 14 ‘ciascuna delle parti del
rosario’ correspond to Maltese usage. Note that 1 is
tagged FO (Fondamentale), 3 d is OB (Obsoleto)
and 14 is TS (Tecnico-Specialistico). posta²
and posta³ are not applicable to Maltese.
For UNITÀ, MED only gives the meaning “unity”. In CED unity has eight
different meanings, of which number 6 (mathematics) has
a, b and c. GRADIT has eight meanings, of
which n. 2 has a and b. In the
Miklem UNITÀ is missing, although one finds the adjective UNIT,
the verb UNIXXA and the nouns UNJONI and UNU, but the Korpus Malti bears
no less than 29,278 quotations under unità.
In many cases Il-Miklem can be very useful, for instance in
the case of BUZZETT. Aquilina only defines it ‘Sketch, one-act play’,
which may be interpreted as synonyms. Erin Serracino Inglott gives clear
definitions, numbering them differently:
(1) t.tekn: xogħol fuq fuq, ġen. ta’ disinn jew mudell
abbozzat ta’ xi ħaġa, għad mhux irfinut; xogħol ukoll ta’ kitba li għadu
fi stat ta’ prova u jonqsu min jorqmu u jżidu; (2) t.teatr.:
xogħol tal-palk (miktub, maħdum, eċċ.) ġen. qasir u f’att wieħed, bosta
drabi drammatiku jew traġiku; att uniku “grand guignol”.
The lexeme buzzett has 76 quotations in Korpus Malti.
Similarly the noun BRIGATA is simply given as “Brigade” in MED, but it
has two meanings in CED:
1 a formation of fighting units, together with
support arms and services, smaller than a division and usually commanded
by a brigadier; 2 a group of people organized for a
certain task [fire, rescue, etc.].
Il-Miklem explains its meanings more fully:
t. mil. korp minn eżerċtu ta’ żewġ riġmenti tal-fanterija,
li jagħmlu nofs diviżjoni; grupp ta’ battaljuni, riġmenti u batteriji
taħt il-kmand ta’ brigadier; (2) ġemgħa żgħażagħ bl-uniformi taħt mexxej
li jgħallimhom dixxiplina, mġiba tajba u ħwejjeġ oħra.
Korpus Malti shows 398 quotations, revealing that its frequency is
high especially in the political domain mentioning the Labour Party
Boys’ Brigade, but also as brigata tat-tifi tan-nar, as a
foreign army division, and there is also a reference to the Salesian
Boys Brigade.
In GRADIT brigata has four definitions:
1a CO gruppo di persone che si sono riunite allo
scopo di divertirsi e stare in allegria: siamo un’allegra b.;
essere della b. 1b OB l’insieme dei familiari
o dei figli; 2 TS milit. unità tattica dell’esercito o
di un’altra arma costituita da due o tre reggimenti: b. di
cavalleria, b. alpina; OB banda di uomini armati spec.
mercenari; OB far b. raccogliersi in armi; 3
CO estens., gruppo organizzato di combattenti irregolari: b.
partigiane.
There is no mention of a boys’ or children’s brigade, which is a
British institution. In this case the entry in the OIM card will explain
the divergence between the Maltese and the Italian meanings.
Another interesting case is that of POLARITÀ. In MED this is entered
under the headword POL/POLU, and is explained by the single word
“polarity”, which has four meanings in the CED: 1 the condition of
having poles; 2 the condition of a body or system in which it has
opposing physical properties at different points, esp. magnetic poles or
electric charge. 3 the particular state of a part of a body or system
that has polarity, an electrode with positive polarity. 4 the state of
having or expressing two directly opposite tendencies, opinions, etc.
Il-Miklem gives three unnumbered definitions, two of which are
presented syntagmatically:
t. fiż. xejra ta’ kalamita, labra manjetika jew apparat
ieħor bħalhom, li juru dejjem bit-truf tagħhom lejn il-poli manjetiċi
ta’ l-art; – elettrika: setgħa ta’ batterija jew
haġ’oħra iċċarġjata bil-kurrent li jkollha fiha ċarġ elettriku pożitiv
fuq tarf u negativ fuq l-ieħor jew fuq iż-żewġ elettrodi; –
tal-ħsieb: xejra tal-ħsieb, tefgħa lejn xi ħaġa
partikulari, lejn xi ideal, eċċ.
The synchronic orientation of the Korpus Malti shows that whereas
POLARITÀ is mainly used in the scientific domain in 50 quotations, its
cognate POLARIZZAZZJONI reveals an extraordinarily high frequency in the
political domain: with no less than 613 quotations, it refers to
partisan politics, the division of a country’s entire population into
two diametrically opposed political camps.
Words of Sicilian origin can be problematic because, having been
adopted many centuries ago, they are more prone to semantic changes.
Their phonetic aspect is complicated first of all by vowel and consonant
differences to their Italian cognates, as well as by the fact that they
have been integrated orally, not through writing. This is because most
of them belong to the so-called “lower” registers and domains (the home,
agriculture, arts and crafts) as opposed to the “higher” registers and
domains (administration, culture, law, and medicine) which entered
later, through Italian, mainly through exposure to the written form.
Tracing the Maltese word to its Sicilian origins is not always easy,
especially when phonetic correspondences with Italian show differences
in the initial letter. This can take various forms like [p] > [b]
picciuni > beċċun; [b] > [p] Italian
bavero > pavru, [p] < [b] / [v]
pastażata < bastasata/vastasata, [kj] >
[tʃ] chiaru > ciaru > ċar; and so on.
Sometimes one can be lucky when the consonant change survives in certain
areas, like vavalor which has become bbavaloru in
certain areas but retained initial v-, vavaloru in others, both
forms being recorded in VS.
A rather intriguing case concerns the entry PLATT. Aquilina gives
three basic meanings without numbering them: one simple definition
‘Plate, dish’ and two phrases which allow the reader to interpret it as
‘course’ (ikla Maltija fiha tliet platti, ‘a Maltese meal
consists of three courses’) and ‘cymbals’ (dak li jdoqq
il-platti, ‘cymbalist’), together with a number of common
expressions. The etymon is shown as [It. piatt-o, -i].
This would require an explanation about the initial group of cononants,
PL-, which sounds like Latin, French or English. The VS does not help
here because it only records “pïattu: m. piatto, stoviglia da cucina o
da tavola”, adding among other phrases, “p. chiànu piatto piano” and
“p. fundu piatto fondo o scodella”. Unlike similar words with the same
initial consonants, plancia and pleggiu for Italian
‘piancia’ and ‘pegno’, the VS does not record plattu.
Aware of the fact that Maltese conserves a good number of words that
have been lost in Sicily itself (Brincat 2009; 2011; 2012), in such
cases one needs to consult the corpus ARTESIA (Archivio Testuale del
Siciliano Antico), led by Mario Pagano. In ARTESIA,
quotations from old Sicilian texts show sentences with both
plactu and placti: “una scutella oy plactu”; “placti
di piltru quatru usati” (the Latinate etymological spelling
-ct- was actually pronounced as [tt]). The conservation of PL-
goes back to Norman times in Sicily, and in many words it has been
replaced by Italian pi- [pj]. Moreover, studies represented on
The Linguistic Atlas of Sicily (Atlante Linguistico della
Sicilia) show the areal spread of characteristic phonetic
correspondences. The change of PL- to [tʃ] happens on the coast below
Agrigento and at the tip of South-east Sicily, the areas nearest to
Malta which have enjoyed the closest ethnic, social and economic
relations for centuries (Ruffino 2018: 47). These explain both the
conservation of PL and the change to [tʃ] in platt ċatt,
although the historical equivalent of this expression, plattu
ciattu, is not cited in VS which only records piattu
chianu.
The historical aspect of lexicography makes it challenging and,
although etymology can be often seen as the quicksands of linguistics,
there are scientific ways that help us overcome some of the difficulties
which may arise for various reasons. One wonders why the MED records
parapleġija but not parapleġiku, and why
partiġjan figures under the headword partit. Some
words are in the Concise Maltese–English, English–Maltese
Dictionary (CMED), but not in the MED (polenta,
Portugiż, posterjuri); others are missing in both,
like podoloġija which has 32 quotations in Korpus Malti. The
Sicilian equivalent terms for falz, polz and
bużnannu are missing in VS although they conform to Sicilian
phonetic correspondences. The lexeme bbuttuna is not a headword
in VS but it is mentioned in two examples under bbuttuni
(singular, where final -i stands for the Italian final
–e of bottone). Compound words with pixxi-
are abundant, both in MED where they fill a whole column and in VS where
they fill nine and a half pages, but a cognate of pixxikalda is
missing in both VS and GRADIT. This indicates that it must have been
coined locally as a euphemism for ‘venereal disease’, extended
metaphorically to ‘a troublemaker’, as shown in MED. In this case in the
OIM it is entered in the “Tipo prestito” category as a “Formazione
imitativa su modello italiano”. The same goes for local formations like
traffikuż and panikuż, for which in Italian they say
trafficato and in presa al panico, or che si
lascia prendere dal panico, respectively. To this, one must add
polemikuż which is not recorded in MED and CMED, but has 113
quotations in Korpus Malti. On the other hand, the hundreds of
pseudoitalianisms, like afforestazzjoni, dentistrija,
femmiċidju, kuntrattur, privatezza,
restawrazzjoni, żviluppaturi, etc., coined under the
pressure of their English cognates, commonly used in code/switching and
mixing, go under the category “Formazione ibrida”, and will have to be
explained under the category “Note per uso esterno”.
Conclusion
On the whole, the OIM experience is quite challenging, but I believe
that it is worthwhile and that hopefully it would be helpful in the
compilation of a new, up-to-date Maltese Dictionary. The website of the
Osservatorio degli Italianismi nel Mondo allows searches under the
Italian headwords, for a comparative exercise, but there is also a box
where one can write the Maltese word and the relative card pops up. At a
later stage the date of first recording will be added when possible. At
this point in time the Maltese group is a bit less than half way through
but, thanks to the dedication and hard work put in by my collaborators,
who have all joined voluntarily and like myself receive no remuneration
at all, the task might be concluded within a year or two.
Abbreviations
ARTESIA Archivio Testuale del Siciliano
Antico
CED Collins English Dictionary
CMED Concise Maltese–English, English–Maltese Dictionary
GRADIT Grande Dizionario Italiano dell’Uso
MED Maltese-English Dictionary
OIM Osservatorio degli Italianismi nel Mondo
VS Vocabolario Siciliano
References
Aquilina, Joseph. 1987–1990. Maltese–English Dictionary.
Malta: Midsea Books.
Aquilina, Joseph. 2006. Concise Maltese–English, English–Maltese
Dictionary. Malta: Midsea Books.
ARTESIA Archivio Testuale del Siciliano Antico. Accessible online at
https://artesia.unict.it/corpus.
Brincat, Giuseppe. 2009. “Sicilianismi e pseudosicilianismi maltesi e
il Vocabolario Siciliano.” In Salvatore C. Trovato (ed.), Studi
linguistici in memoria di Giovanni Tropea, 111-116. Alessandria:
Edizioni dell’Orso.
Brincat, Giuseppe. 2011. “Per il vocabolario del siciliano antico:
Malta prima dei Cavalieri.” In Mari D’Agostino (ed.), Per i
linguisti del nuovo millennio. Studi offerti a Giovanni Ruffino,
304–311. Palermo: CSFLS, Sellerio.
Brincat, Giuseppe. 2012. “Il siciliano dei documenti di Malta
(1350-1550).” Bollettino del Centro Studi Filologici e Linguistici
Siciliani 23: 5–12.
Brincat, Joseph M. 1996. “Maltese words. An etymological analysis of
the Maltese lexicon.” In Lüdtke, Jens (ed.), Romania Arabica.
Festschrift für Reinhold Kontzi, 111-116. Tübingen: Gunter Narr
Verlag.
Brincat, Joseph M. 2021. Maltese and Other Languages. A
Linguistic History of Malta. Santa Venera: Midsea Books.
Collins English Dictionary. Accessible online at https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english
De Mauro, Tullio. 2000. Grande Dizionario Italiano dell’Uso.
Torino: UTET.
Korpus Malti. Accessible online at https://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/CQPweb/.
Piccitto, Giorgio & Tropea, Giovanni & Trovato, Salvatore.
1977–2002. Vocabolario Siciliano, Palermo: Centro Studi
Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani.
Ruffino, Giovanni. 2018. Variazione diatopica in Sicilia.
Cartografia elementare. Palermo: Centro di Studi Filologici e
Linguistici Siciliani.
Serracino Inglott, Erin. 1975–1989. Il-Miklem Malti. Malta:
Klabb Kotba Maltin.
Stammerjohann, Harro. 2008. Dizionario di italianismi in inglese,
francese e tedesco. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca. Accessible
online at https://difit.italianismi.org
