cafuné – brazilian portuguese: the act of running one’s fingers, gently but deeply, through someone else’s hair 積ん読 (tsundoku) – japanese: the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other such unread books
木漏れ日 (komorebi) – japanese: sunlight filtering through the trees
mångata – swedish: the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water
verklempt – yiddish: a person who is too emotional to speak
liefdesverdriet – dutch: the heartache caused from an unrequited love and the mental pains one endures; the physical pain of depression
fika – swedish/finnish: gathering together to talk and take a break from everyday routines, usually drinking coffee and eating pastries
幽玄 (yūgen) – japanese: an indescribable sentiment, can only be described as a painful awareness of the mysterious beauty and human suffering
l’esprit de l’escalier – french: the moment one finally thinks of a witty remark, far too late, after the opportunity has passed
kilig – tagalog: the feeling of butterflies in your stomach, usually when something romantic or cute takes place いるす
(irusu) – japanese: pretending to be absent from home when someone is at the door
habseligkeiten – german: personal belongings, small treasures and property, which define our happiness and sentiments
nefelibata – portuguese: cloud walker; name given to the quixotic dreamers, they appear spacey, otherworldly, but intelligent
σοφρωσύνη (sophrosyne) – greek: self-control, balance, wisdom & grace;virtue that follows the aphorisms “nothing in excess” & “know thyself"
hiraeth – welsh: homesickness for a place which never even existed. Connotations of sadness, yearning, profound nostalgia and wistfulness
torpe – tagalog: being too shy to pursue amorous desires
waldeinsamkeit – german: the feeling of being alone in the woods
litost – czech: the humiliated despair we feel when someone accidentally reminds us, trough their accomplishment, of our inadequacies
dustsceawung – old english: contemplation of the fact that dust used to be other things – the walls of a city, a book, a great tree…
duende – spanish: the spirit of evocation; the mysterious power a work of art has to deeply move a person
gattara – italian: a woman, often old and lonely, who devotes herself to stray cats
tоска – russian: a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause, a longing with nothing to long for, nostalgia
φιλότιμο (philotimo) – greek: a complex array of virtues; expressed through acts of generosity & sacrifice w/o expecting anything in return gezellig – dutch: abstract sensation of individual well-being that one shares with others;cozy ambience, anything pleasant, homely, friendly
In Italian, when somebody lends you something he will often say “Si chiama Pietro.” (Its name is Pietro) because it rhymes with “Torna indietro.” (It comes back, with the meaning of ‘I want it back’).
I was wondering, does something similar happen in English too? Like, “It’s called Jack” or something?
I’ve been using my ‘home-made’ translation of it as “It’s called Jack and it’s coming back” for years now! Always delivered with a smile, since a lot of Italian idioms are a little confrontational when translated outside of their cultural context: ”Patti chiari, amicizia lunga” comes to mind.
Italian has various workarounds if you wish to avoid using an undesired pronoun. In instances where the pronoun is a non-subject (i.e. direct or indirect object), we could use:
(una, questa, quella…) persona “(a, this, that…) person”, “someone”;
Qualcuno “someone”;
Name of the person in question (easiest choice).
1a. Ho incontrato una persona molto gentile per strada. Mi ha chiesto di andare a prenderci un caffè = I meet someone in the street and they were very nice. They asked me to go take a coffee together (non gender specific).
1b. Ho incontrato un/una ragazzo/ragazza molto gentile per strada. Mi ha chiesto [..] = I met a boy/girl in street and he/she was really nice. He/she asked [..] (gender-specific)
2a. Ho finalmente incontrato qualcuno che mi ha reso felice = I’ve finally met someone that has made me happy (non gender-specific)
2b. Ho finalmente incontrato un/una uomo/donna che mi ha reso felice = I’ve finally met a man/woman that made me happy (gender-specific)
3a. Ho inviato un libro a Lucia/Fabrizio = I sent Lucia/Fabrizio a book (non gender-specific)
3b. Le/gli ho inviato un libro = I sent her/him a book (gender-specific)
In cases where the pronoun would act as the subject of a sentence, it would be more natural to drop or omit the subject altogether and leave the conjugated verb (1a). Alternatively, we could use verbs conjugated in the 3rd person plural to talk, generically, about people of unspecified gender, even if the subject is singular.
We are currently without a neutral form of pronouns and stuff like that. We do use the * at the end of a word (ragazzo/ragazza/ragazz*) but it’s not something “useful” when you’re actually talking. Long story short, we’re still working on it.
In italian, the neutral is expressed by the “inclusive masculine” which is actually sexist if you think about it. Like, a group of people is addressed with a “male” noun, even if in the group there’s a majority of females. Siblings are called “fratelli”(brothers) even if there’s only one brother and four sisters. Just to make an example.
We have different “alternatives”, like the pronoun “essi” which is basically the english “they”, but italian is an inflectional language so if you use “essi”, which is plural, you only create a whole bunch of confusion with verb conjugations.
But language can change and evolve, so maybe in the future we will have a neutral form for non-binary people. If our country changes as well, but I’m not that optimistic since the last elections.
– Mi hanno detto (lit. “they told me”) domani che la scuola è chiusa. – Chi te l’ha detto? – Un insegnante prima che finisse la lezione.
– They told me school is closed tomorrow. – Who told you? – A teacher before the class ended [told me].
Other strategies are more context-specific and would consist in using either gender-neutral or apparently masculine nouns and adjectives, e.g. l’insegnante instead of il professore or la professoressa “teacher”; collega “colleague” (gender non-specific) or colleghi “colleagues” instead of gender-specific feminine plural colleghe “[female] colleagues”.
Evident disadvantages are represented by adjetives and past participles of intransitive verbs (verbs that have essere as the auxiliary). These will have to agree in number and grammatical gender with the nouns or names they’re modifying, e.g. è stanco “he’s tired”, è stanca “she’s tired” (cf. siamo stanchi “we’re tired” both all-inclusive and gender-specific).
(Side note: When talking about large groups, masculine plural morphology is more likely to be used as all-inclusive than gender-specific, which means that masculine plural nouns referring to people are more likely to lose their gender-specificity in favour of inclusiveness. On the other hand, feminine morphology is never all-inclusive and always gender-specific.)
Italian word(s) of the day: saltuariamente “on and off” (adverbial), e.g. Ho insegnato saltuariamente italiano per 8 anni “I taught Italian on and off for 8 years”
Hi there! It is, indeed, not possible to answer a question like that. In Italian there is a whole series of happy little words like cincischiare (loaf around, procrastinate) or fuffa (unimportant gossip or cheap merchandise) and wonderful Latin constructs like inscrutabile (literally, that cannot be looked at properly) and ineffabile (that cannot be said), not to mention the eyebrow-raising libridinoso (turned on by books) but what I’m also fascinated by are political neologisms, which tend to be very colourful, mostly short-lived, and often obscure both for language learners and native speakers who forgot to check the news for a couple of hours. Here are a few of them.
Benaltrismo – Substantivisation of the expression ben altri (‘most definitely other’) as used in sentences like, Sono ben altri i problemi del paese (‘The country has far more important issues to discuss’). It describes a transparent, but efficient, rhetorical trick used to imply that the subject at hand is frivolous or unimportant and one should focus on more urgent matters.
Bunga bunga – Look, I don’t even know. Legend says the term comes from a dirty joke Gaddafi, of all people, once told Berlusconi. It has come to mean ‘an orgy involving a powerful leader’ and the fact we need the term at all should shame the entire country into never talking to anyone again.
Celodurismo – This is a relatively old political term and probably tells you everything you need to know about the party who’s about to rule half of Italy. In the 90s, one of the most popular slogan of far right Lega Nord was La Lega ce l’ha duro (‘Lega is fully hard’ or something like that), hence the term, which should convey the idea of an aggressive, uncompromising, non PC and all round masculine way of doing politics.
Inciucio – Originally a Neapolitan word meaning ‘gossip’, inciucio has been promoted to be a synonym of another wonderful word, intrallazzo, and it now means ‘political intrigue, dishonest manoeuvre’.
Odiocrazia – ‘Hateocracy’, ie a political ideology dominated by the opposition to, and hatred towards, the other parties. Amazingly, this has been around since 2008, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone actually use it.
Tesoretto – Literally ‘small treasure’, but it actually means ‘extra tax revenues’. And by the way, this is actually one of my pet peeves – the woobification of serious words, and what the hell – tesoretto here and tesoretto there and it looks like you’re talking about Smurfs or something, and what’s even worse is furbetto – furbo is already a weird, almost pejorative word in Italian, but furbetto – which, until recently, was only used to describe children who misbehaved – is a word we now use to describe grown-ass people committing actual crimes, and ugh.
Vaffa Day or V-Day – Back in 2007, comedian Beppe Grillo invited people to mobilize in a ‘Fuck Them Day’ to support a new kind of Parliament: people turned up to sign so that MPs could only complete two terms of office and that they could be elected only if they were more or less honest. The initiative was a huge success, and it’s almost bittersweet to think of it now that Grillo’s own party has been exposed as just another nest of power-grabbing, corrupt and self-serving dickbags. Life, eh?
Webete – From web and ebete (‘idiot’), not exactly a political term but a word invented by exasperated journalist Enrico Mentana to shut up the self-appointed experts who plagued his Facebook posts. A related term is leone da tastiera (‘keyboard lion’), which means something like ‘cyberbully’ (according to Wikipedia: ‘a person who targets, offends or threatens others with the goal of discrediting them’). This new idea that everyone’s opinion is equally valid has descended upon the country like a plague, and the fierce debates it left in its wake, most famously about vaccines, prompted a doctor to declare that ‘science is not a democracy’. The new government, however, seems likely to disagree.
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