baristas or baristi?
from a discussion on another site, the answer from Counter Culture Coffee’s roaster Peter Giuliano:
Tags:Language, like coffee, is interesting!
In Italian, most masculine words ending in ‘o’ are pluralized ‘i’. Like un gatto, due gatti (one cat, two cats). Feminine words ending in ‘a’ are usually pluralized ‘e’. Un pizza, due pizze.
“Barista” is irregular. Since it is the Italianized version of the English word “Bartender”, it is considered a foreign word. All foreign words are considered masculine, and therefore pluralized with the “i”. un barista, due baristi. Strange how it works, English word becomes Italian, Italianized word becomes English again.
We sometimes use the pluralized version of Italian words. Papparazzi, for example. Pepperoncini. Biscotti. Other times, we use English pluralizations. Pizzas, gelatos.
I, myself, use ‘Baristas’ and ‘Baristi’ interchangeably. Sometimes I say ‘Rome’ (English usage) sometimes I say ‘Roma’. Sometimes I call my wife ‘Bella ragazza’ and she eats it up.
February 20th, 2005 at 6:24 am
Hm, this is all true, except for the “all foreign words are masculine” part. I’m pretty sure “foto” is foreign-derived, and it is feminine (because shortened from “fotografia”). I’d have to check, though.
March 18th, 2005 at 10:18 am
Nice body of work here sir! Dropped a link to your latte art photo gallery on my site.
Cheers,
Colin -
Editor/Creator CoffeeCrew.Com
March 20th, 2005 at 5:23 am
Well, you’ve got a point there, but the reality (of language) is a little more complicated. Fact is, not all masculine words, in Italian, end with ‘o’: for example, we say ‘cane’ (dog), and it’s considered of male gender (its plural is a regular ‘cani’).
Some words are even of ‘neutral’ gender (even if Italian doesn’t have a correspondent of neuter, like English): ‘vigile’, for example (which means ‘traffic officer’, or ‘traffic cop’, I don’t know which one you’re using in America :-), is the same for men and women: we tell the gender difference by the use of the article (so it’s ‘il vigile’ for a man, ‘la vigile’ for a woman. Plural ends in ‘i’ for both: ‘i vigili’, ‘le vigili’).
What I find of particular interest, instead, is another thing: that, even if you have a correspondent English word - bartender - from which the Italian word derived, you’re using the Italian word instead of the original. That’s really a funny and most interesting thing, for me, and it says more about a culture and how it’s perceived than a lot of other things. I’m sure it happens in almost every language: for example, it’s come into use the word ‘esaustivo’, which is modeled on the English ‘exhaustive’ (same meaning). Interesting enough, the English word derives from Latin - which is Italian’s “grandfather”: so from Latin it came into English, and from English into Italian - it skipped the direct passage, it seems!
(I stop here, before taking the long route and ending up writing a whole essay on the subject! Thanks for a post that inspired me to put aside my usual laziness in commenting…)