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…)

Cheers,

Colin -
Editor/Creator CoffeeCrew.Com