Introduction
When it comes to foreign language study, vocabulary takes a significant amount of time. In general, there are two ways to learn a new word, by rote memory or repeated drills, and by word analysis including thinking up a mnemonic. If your preferred learning style is the latter for most words, you’ll find Learning Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics to be a welcome addition to your personal library. The book is the first of its kind that combines a moderate amount of Italian etymology and made-up mnemonics in one single volume. It aims to help adults or young adults to learn Italian vocabulary, with a practical balance between scholarly research and light reading. This is both a pocket-size dictionary used as a reference, and supplemental study material used for leisure reading.
It is a well-known fact that cognates help foreign language learners study vocabulary, and a slightly less known fact that etymology or origin of words helps.[1] Unfortunately, as of today, there is rarely any book that explicitly utilizes etymological information to help learners memorize words. On the one hand, etymological dictionaries written by scholars focus on the task proper, i.e., providing etymology, usually not giving consideration to its practical value in helping people to learn vocabulary. On the other hand, there are books written to make use of man-made mnemonics, with no regard to etymology.[2]
With these two approaches, etymology and mnemonics, we see a long-stretched but maybe narrow gap that can be bridged with some training or practice. It is “long-stretched” because thousands or tens of thousands of words can be dealt with in this manner, and “narrow” because many words that don’t “ring a bell” to an English speaker only need an easy hint or reminder for the learner to connect their meanings to their origins.
Take the Italian word ogni (“every”) as an example. This book will tell you it is cognate with the first element, omni-, of the English compound words omnibus, omnipotent (“all-powerful”, as said of God). Back in Latin, it literally means “all” when in plural or “every” in singular. Dimenticare means “to forget” because the word can be analyzed into di- (prefix from Latin dis- meaning “removing”) + ment (root meaning “mind”) + -icare (suffix for a verb), and the word is cognate with English dementia; forgetting or dementia is removing of the mind. (Knowledge of Latin is not needed to read this book but it will definitely help if you have it.)
Unfortunately, not all words can make use of etymology to aid memory, for various reasons. The etymology may be too obscure or too technical for an average reader, may bring up words that sound or spell too differently from any English word that could help, or may simply be unknown. Therefore, a different tactic has to be used to fill the gap, using artificial mnemonics. For example, domani (“tomorrow”) has cognates in all major Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese) but not English; note it is not cognate with English domain and is etymologically unrelated to Latin dominus or dominicus. But as a mnemonic, you can imagine you’ll go to the Dominicus Church tomorrow. [3] Instead of either etymology or a mnemonic, many times this book gives both for a word so you can choose whichever you prefer. Avvocato means “lawyer” or “advocate”, and is cognate with English advocate. But isn’t it odd to associate a lawyer with an advocate (as in an advocate of peace) when you consider the generally negative image of the former and the positive or neutral image of the latter? It turns out that an advocate is indeed a type of legal professional in many countries except the US. Due to this unique situation in the US, if you are an American, you may as well imagine a lawyer eating an avocado, a mnemonic this book recommends.
The current book will primarily rely on etymology, and only fall back on mnemonics when etymology is lacking or too obscure. While mnemonics stop serving any purpose and can be dispensed with after the learner fully remembers the word, etymology may be retained as knowledge, if the learner wishes, and in fact often does so, to go beyond just learning a foreign language. Thus, in a fun way this book offers the additional advantage in terms of expanding the learner’s historical and cultural background.
Any “irrelevant” details in etymology not conducive to vocabulary study are skipped to avoid “pedantic” boredom, because the book is for practical use, not for pure scholarly research. To accommodate a general reader, only knowledge of English is assumed; minimum Latin and practically no words in other languages will be given in description of each word. On the other hand, in case the “internal” history of a word is not enough to explain the origin, its “external” history is researched and provided, especially when it comes to semantics. For example, campione is easy when it means “champion”, but it can also mean “sample”, from the same etymological source. To explain the latter sense, we find that two statisticians already solved the mystery, i.e. a champion best represents his team as he’s the best, but a sample also best represents the group it is in, from a statistical point of view. These two senses of representation conflate and one single word can denote either a champion or a sample.
This book is for people to study Italian, specifically Italian vocabulary. The intended readers are adults and young adults only, since young children tend to complain that “I have to remember that hint”, referring to the etymology or mnemonic as an extra burden instead of an aid. Adults will be able to utilize their life experience and general linguistic knowledge, even if it’s implicit or dormant in their minds, in second language acquisition. Not only is the book useful to high school and college students, but it is also and perhaps more appealing to the people learning Italian outside of a school environment, because vocabulary acquisition becomes a more prominent obstacle in learning a foreign language when not following a textbook, in which new words would be fixed and outlined in each lesson. Polyglots or people knowing or learning multiple languages, especially other Romance languages, will find this book particularly helpful. The more language experience, the better. Among other things, knowing an additional language may give you an advantage in spotting cognation not mentioned by this book due to the restriction that the reader is assumed to only know English. And in case of unhelpful etymology, there’s also extra advantage in conjuring up a better mnemonic that sounds and means closer to a word in that additional language you know.
When mnemonics have to be created, there are tricks to help search for the best words or phrases. They are summarized in the Appendix.
References used by this book are as follows:
* Wiktionary.org, which uses various etymological dictionaries. Fast and convenient reference.
* Etimo.it or equivalently Ottorino Pianigiani, Vocabolario etimologico della lingua italiana. The website is convenient but sometimes the book is consulted for readability.
* Barbara Colonna, Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 1997.
* Martin Maiden, A Linguistic History of Italian, 2013. An excellent account of sound changes in the history of the Italian language.
* Charles H. Grandgent, From Latin to Italian, 2008.
* Webster’s New World Italian Dictionary, 1992.
* The Oxford Italian Dictionary, 1997.
* WordReference.com and Linkq.com for forum discussions.
* Hinative.com for semantic and usage distinctions between synonyms.
* Context.reverso.net, Linguee.com, and various other websites for usage examples in real-life contexts.
* Google Translate, when used as a dictionary, is the only one that provides a translation frequency indicator, which “indicates how often a translation appears in public documents”. The relative frequencies assigned to translated words are used to rank the meanings or definitions of an Italian word.
* Google Books Ngram Viewer. This viewer is regularly checked to determine phrase frequency. Only those with relatively high frequency are included as examples for the headwords. Frequency is also used in ordering example expressions having the same meaning; e.g. riunione di famiglia is given before riunione familiare in examples because the former is more common. Occasionally, frequency change in history is pointed out according to this viewer.
* Francesco Zambaldi, Vocabolario etimologico italiano, 1837. While this tome does not contain many headwords, each headword that is included is explained in great detail.
* Auguste Brachet, Etymological Dictionary of the French Language, 1878. Even though this is an etymological dictionary of French, it is unique in clearly explaining sound changes of each word from Latin to French, from which many English words are borrowed.
* Etymonline.org, a professional quality English language etymology web site created based on sources such as Oxford English Dictionary; Walter W. Skeat, Concise Dictionary of English Etymology; Dictionary.com, the etymology section.
Notes
§1. The words in this book are taken from the Italian Web Corpus, “a 2 billion word corpus constructed from the Web limiting the crawl to the .it domain”, which can be downloaded at http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/frqc/itwac.num (warning: big file), and are ordered by word usage frequency. Simply put, the words in this book are ordered in descending frequency of usage. The frequency rank number precedes the headword, both in bold font, e.g. 61 stesso, which means the headword stesso is the 61st in the Corpus. (The higher the number, the less frequent or common.) Listing the words in frequency order in a dictionary-like book offers the unique advantage that the reader has a better sense of how common the word is in real language use, and in writing, can better distinguish synonyms from the frequency perspective, e.g., choosing the more common mandare (“to send”) instead of the less common spedire. The index at the end of this book lists all words in alphabetic order for easy lookup. Very common words (the first 60 in the list, e.g. di, ci, essere) and very “easy” words for an English-speaking person (e.g. grande) are omitted. This book will eventually include at least the first 8000 words of the Corpus, but with all omissions for the said reasons, probably about 3000 headwords will be included. Note that many Italian words are close to their English counterparts, but the nuances in meaning may warrant inclusion; e.g. eventuale (“possible”, “contingent”, “potential”, possibile) is not the same as eventual in English, and is thus included with a warning of false friends. However, there are a large number of Italian words that cannot be easily qualified as false friends and yet should not be literally translated according to the meanings of their English counterparts (e.g., profondo most commonly simply means “deep”, literally, not “profound”). Such words may or may not be included.
§2. Headwords are in bold type, as well as in “See also”. Words considered to be linguistic units instead of part of the sentence are in italic. Words as definitions or meanings are enclosed in double quotation marks, except when they are definitions for the headwords. Definitions for headwords may occasionally include Italian synonyms, which are in italic. (Italian synonyms form part of headword definition generally only after this word occurred as a headword on an earlier page, i.e. only if the synonym has a higher usage frequency than the current headword. But this rule may be broken if the synonym is very useful to know.)
§3. Part of speech or word class, enclosed in parentheses, is obvious, such as n. for noun, adj. for adjective, interj. for interjection. They are only labeled in case of possible ambiguity. Gender is marked only if it is counter-intuitive or there is an interesting point to make. For example, it is pointed out that problema is masculine in spite of the -a ending, because the Romance language words from Ancient Greek and ending with -a are masculine. It is critica, not critico, that means “criticism”. A. Brachet in his Etym. Dict. French Lang. remarked that “[in the case a concrete substantive or noun took an abstract sense] the concrete substantive is often masculine, whereas the abstract was feminine”; or as Simone de Beauvoir succinctly remarked, “most abstract entities are feminine”. That observation of French words, in fact Romance language words, serves as a convenient mnemonic, which the reader will be reminded of wherever appropriate in this book.
§4. The keyword or keywords in a mnemonic, which provide a phonetic clue, are underlined. For example, the mnemonic for the headword piccolo (“small”) is “a small picture hanging low”, suggesting that you focus on pic of picture when you learn the word piccolo.
§5. Two or more headwords are in one entry (i.e. paragraph) if they belong to one lexeme[4] or one is derived from another, and their frequencies are not too far apart, and their spelling forms and meanings are not too different. They are listed in a position according to the frequency position of the first of these words in the Corpus. Within this entry, the more frequent headword is given first. For example, storia (“story”; “history”) and storico (“historical”, “historic”) are two headwords in one entry or paragraph, which is listed in the position according to the frequency of storia, and storia is given before storico because storia is more frequent or common than storico. Note that not all forms of the same lexeme are grouped under one headword; those with significantly different meanings, with stem changes, or with a large frequency difference may still be listed separately, if they warrant inclusion at all.
§6. The word “root” is only used to refer to the root of a word, synonymous with “stem” in most contexts, not to the source or origin of a word or etymon, as used in some other literature.
§7. Some common etymological rules are briefly outlined below. To remember the word, reverse the etymological evolution. “Italian, from its beginning to the present day, has shown itself the most conservative of the Neo-Latin tongues” (C. H. Grandgent, From Latin to Italian: An Historical Outline of the Phonology and Morphology of the Italian Language). In spite of the stability from early to present-day Italian, however, there were quite noticeable changes from Latin to Italian. It helps if we become familiar with a few common patterns in these changes.
Needless to say, it takes some practice to make good use of etymology in learning new words. For example, you’ll need to think of or mentally reverse the development of the word in history (from tt to pt or ct, from s- to one of the various prefixes, and see which one forms a word that makes sense), try splitting a word in different locations (pomeriggio into po- and -meriggio instead of pome- and -riggio), among other tricks. Hopefully this book offers essential if not minimal help in this regard.
Tip There are times when it is not obvious whether an English word exists that is related to a given word in another language. For example, Italian coscia (“thigh”) is from Latin coxa (“thigh”), which enters English as an anatomical term for “basal segment of a limb of various arthropods”. But this term hardly rings a bell to a general reader. Fortunately, Google, like many other search engines, provides a site-specific search that can help us. In this case, we can limit the search to an English dictionary website and see all (or most) of its pages that mention the non-English word, with search keywords like site:dictionary.com coxa. One of the search results is the page for the word cushion, and we quickly find that English cushion can be traced to Latin coxa. This information, or knowledge, certainly helps us remember the Italian word coscia better than using the rare or technical English word coxa or using it alone. When Wiktionary or any other source lists unhelpful English descendants (such as coxa) given the etymon of the Italian word being studied, or does not list multilingual descendants, checking to see all that an English dictionary has to say about the Italian word or its etymon sometimes can reveal a helpful English word-Italian word relationship, which otherwise would require a lot of thinking or trial-and-error to uncover.
§8. Some words have many meanings. But only the basic ones are given, and if possible to determine, the more common or frequent meanings are given first, unlike in most dictionaries where the original or literal meanings are listed before the derived ones. For example, the definition of ritenere is given as “to believe, to feel, to consider; to retain, to restrain”, and it is pointed out that the primary meaning is “to believe”, not “to retain”, according to our Italian language experience and also Google Translate translation frequency, while most dictionaries reverse the order of these two meanings. Very different meanings are separated by semicolons instead of commas. Semicolons also separate the meanings of different words that happen to be spelled the same.[5]
§9. Usage examples are generally short and clear. Inclusion is often evaluated according to the frequency on Google Ngram. Idioms are occasionally included if they are frequent, and easy to interpret (i.e. from the literal to the current meaning). In the examples, a slash (/) indicates replaceable options. For example, una casa di / a 2 piani (“a 2-story house”), suggesting that either di or a is acceptable.
§10. Cognates are two or more words, each in its own language, which are regularly (i.e. following a common pattern or according to certain rules) derived from another common word (etymon) in a different language. This book traces word origin up to Latin, occasionally beyond Latin or to other languages. If a common word is found only in a remote ancient language such as Proto-Indo-European, for practical purposes, cognation is generally not acknowledged, but sometimes is briefly mentioned if it helps with word study. Cognates are not doublets, which are two words, both in the same language, that are derived from another common word in a different language. Technically, cognates are distinguished from loanwords, which are borrowed. If we use > and < to denote “developing into” and “deriving from”, respectively, and suppose Italian word I < Latin word L < Proto-Indo-European word PIE > Proto-Germanic word PG > English word E, we can say that I and E are cognates, as in the case of English do and Italian fare, from PIE *dʰeh₁-. But a word can also be borrowed or loaned from one language into another, i.e. without going through regular phonological development. For example, both Italian tè (“tea”) and English tea are borrowed from a word in Hokkien, a language spoken in southern China, by way of one or more intermediate languages. This book still loosely calls these words borrowed from a common source cognates since the word cognate itself is already not so strictly used among educated English speakers that are non-specialists.
§11. If absolutely needed, pronunciation is indicated with International Phonetic Symbols, most of which are obvious. Those few an American reader may not be familiar with are /æ/ as a in map, /ɛ/ as ea in dead, /ə/ as a in canoe, /ɔ/ as o in joy, /θ/ as th in thin, /ð/ as th in that, /ʃ/ as sh in shy, /ʒ/ as s in usual, /j/ as y in yes, /tʃ/ as ch in china, /dʒ/ as j in joy. But not all these symbols are used in this book. Since Italian language has distinct geminated or long consonants, if pronunciation is given and it has double consonants, remember to pronounce it correctly.
§12. The book assumes no strict format for each entry, although it generally begins word definition, cognates, and doublets if any. Free text format is the best option to provide appropriate amount of usage notes and warnings, such as “not to be confused”, “false friend”, “note the first meaning, which may not be easy to guess”, to list a few. Unlike other sources that utilize etymology to assist in vocabulary study, this book makes a great effort to not miss any apparent disconnection between etymology and modern meaning of the word, and failing that, explicitly acknowledges it, usually followed by a best-effort mnemonic, as in “The meaning of ... may be due to ...”, “It’s not clear how the sense .... Use a mnemonic such as ...”. Even a seemingly casual mention of an interesting fact (as in “It’s interesting that ...”) is meant to strengthen the learner’s memory.
Everything done in this book is an attempt to achieve one goal only: help you remember the words. This is particularly helpful in initial encounter with a new word, when you use this book to gain advantage in the form of a clue or hint in order to avoid a completely blank mind when seeing the word again not long after you have learned it. But in the end, the reader is still required to study the words, combined with a large amount of reading or listening, which provides a rich context to the otherwise isolated word study. Etymology or mnemonics may indeed become a burden instead of an aid without genuine hard work.
For the usage frequency table based on the Lexique corpus and used by this book, my contact information, and other information, please visit http://yong321.freeshell.org/liw/
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[1] Cognates are words in different languages that are derived from the same word in their common parent language. Technically, they are different from loan words. This will be further explained later.
[2] Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews’s Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters, and Michael Gruneberg’s Spanish by Association, doing an excellent job as intended, provide good examples of memory by mnemonics only.
[3] In this book, underlined text refers to the word or words that serve as the key in the mnemonic or a “linkword” as some people call it.
[4] Lexeme is the set of words comprising the lemma i.e. canonical form (dictionary form) and various inflected forms; e.g. go, goes, went, gone, going form a lexeme, with go as the lemma.
[5] Most dictionaries list two words that happen to be spelled the same in two separate headword entries. This book merges them into one entry or paragraph, separates their meanings with a semicolon and points out that they are two distinct words.