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Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

(www.cnn.com)
231 points rntn | 3 comments | 02 Apr 23 17:19 UTC | HN request time: 1.469s | source
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antirez ◴[02 Apr 23 20:10 UTC] No.35414618[source]▶
Please, don't think Italians are like that. It's just this stupid government. For instance in Italian, unlike Spanish, French, ..., there are no italianized words for all the computer science words, we just use English. In general there is not a big sentiment of culture self-defence. But this government is trying to do things that will appeal the dumb people voting for it.
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pmontra ◴[02 Apr 23 20:59 UTC] No.35415153[source]▶
Thinking about a standard computer, accessories and concepts, there are no common Italian words for computer, mouse, touchpad, touchscreen, scanner, web, link, app, database, word processor, bit, byte and the defunct floppy disk. Everything else is commonly named in Italian. Keyboard, memory, disk (in general, but hard disk is in English), screen, pen drives, power unit, mother board (this is maybe 50-50), folders, icons, programs, processes, windows, buttons, sort, filter, search, rows, columns, cells, sheets.
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1. totetsu ◴[03 Apr 23 00:51 UTC] No.35417167[source]▶
Are the english words spoken in a way that follows italian phonic patterns(vowel sounds and consonant vowel pairs)? How does grammatical gender work for loan words, or newly made up words?
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2. pmontra ◴[03 Apr 23 06:24 UTC] No.35419271[source]▶
They are spoken with an Italian accent that fits into the Italian sentence they are used in. I think this is common to all languages, they import foreign words and adapt them at least to the accent of the language. I don't think that the tt in spaghetti has the same sound in English and Italian.

Italian words must have a gender, there is no neutral. Computer, mouse, touchscreen and touchpad are male. Power unit is female even if its Italian counterpart alimentatore is male: il power unit sounds bad, la power unit sounds good. Motherboard is female and its translation scheda madre is also female. Bug, bit and byte are male.

The rule is that loan words enter Italian with their singular form and they don't change at the plural. This might have funny consequences.

Medium / media (radio, TV, etc) entered Italian from English which got them from Latin. The plural of medium in Italian is still medium and pluralizing it as media as in English and Latin is a grammatical error. Media is becoming more common as more people read them in English sentences, not because they are studying Latin :-)

Gender is decided case by case as the word fits better in Italian. Medium is male (il / i, un)

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3. pmontra ◴[03 Apr 23 09:47 UTC] No.35420860[source]▶
Edit: power unit is actually power supply.