2746: Brave and Barbarous Jun 27, 2024
English has lots of pairs of words that are doublets (i.e. have the same etymology) but are also antonyms. One example would be host-guest, but another comes from the words ‘brave’ and ‘barbarian’. While these words aren’t opposites per se, the former denotes righteousness and courage while the latter connotes incivility. ‘Barbarian’ originates from a Greek onomatopoeia, but this eventually morphed, along with influence from the Latin ‘prāvus’ (crooked), the source of the English ‘depraved’ to form ‘bravus’, thence ‘bravo’ meaning ‘bold’ or ‘showing off’, and also ‘skilled’ which did not carry over into English. This can help to understand the sense of ‘bravo’ at a time of applause, or even its historic meaning of ‘swordsman’.
It was only later into the 15th century that the sense in Italian ‘bravo’ was changed in French ‘brave’ to go from ‘wild’ to ‘courageous’ and eventually ‘valiant’ which English adopted thereafter.
2553: Calzones and Underpants Dec 9, 2021
The pizza-dish known as 'calzone' in Italian means 'stocking; trouser' certainly does not mean the same thing as it does in Italian, but across other romance languages there is another level of semantic distinction. In Italian 'calzoni' these days means 'trousers', but in Spanish 'calzón' means 'underpants'. Even in languages developed later from these Romance languages don't always retain the meanings, with this distinction seen in the Papiamento word for trousers 'kalzon', taken from the Spanish 'calzón' (underpants).
2465: piano Sep 11,
'Piano' means 'soft' in Italian, and this might seem strange on its own considering the power of the instrument, but it is shortened from 'pianoforte', literally 'soft-loud', named for the fact it could alternate volume more than its predecessors, harpsichords and clavichords. The word for 'piano' was borrowed, but words of that same root had been around for some time before. Both 'plane' and 'plain' are related to each other come from the sense of level, smooth, broad, even etc..
2137: ciao Oct 21, 2020
Especially in Italy but also around Europe more broadly thanks in part to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ‘ciao’ is a common greeting. As might be discerned from the fact that it is used for both farewells and meeting, it has a generic meaning along the likes of ‘aloha’ (love) or ‘shalom’ [שלום] (‘peace’), but in this case it comes as a variation to a dialectal form of Italian ‘schiavo’ meaning ‘I am your slave’, shortened from the Latin phrase ‘servus humillimus, domine spectabilis’ (I am your humble servant, admirable lord). In that sense, it is a gesture of humility. However, in the Italian, like ‘slave’ itself, the word also comes from the same root as ‘Slav’, but in Greek Σκλάβος (sklábos) and Latin ‘sclāvus’ the word has a [k] that is not seen in either English or Italian but is still seen in German ‘Sklave’. This is also connected with the Greek κλάβος (klábos) meaning ‘fame; renown’, which was also itself used as a greeting, but in any case in Italian [skl] becomes [sch] as with ‘ciao’ (or ‘schiavo’) . The [s] at the beginning just got dropped off.
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