Re:Can Italians Understand Latin?
by squarefoot on Friday June 16, 2023 @07:52AM
(#36355000)
As an Italian I've studied Latin at school and was quite good at it. Some 45 years later I still can read and translate on the fly very simple texts, but the two languages are two planets apart; different structure aside, they share some common terms but Italian adopted others from foreign languages, to the point that some Latin terms are still present in English but were eliminated from Italian. A couple examples: the Italian for "paper", "carta", in latin was a quite similar "papirus", while "charta" was used only for government documents and the like. Also, the Italian for "cheese", "formaggio", is more similar to the french "fromage" than the also Latin but rarely used "formaticum", while the most used term in Latin was "caseum".
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Yes, but we almost always have the latin derived form in close meaning other uses.
In your example, "caseum" is not transferred in common italian, but the "cheese industry" is "industria casearia", so - generally speaking - you can get most times the meaning.
The real issues come when there are "false friends", in the old times there was the famous (I believe fabricated) example "I VITELLI DEI ROMANI SONO BELLI", which is valid both in Italian and in Latin, but in the former language it means "Romans' calves are beautiful" while in the latter one it means "Go, Vitellio, to the sound of the Roman god's war".
> I VITELLI DEI ROMANI SONO BELLI
This is hilarious, thanks for sharing.
I studied Italian in high school and during quarantine decided to try and learn Latin. I was really surprised how many common words were not cognates. Normally if I dug into it, there was a related Italian word, but with a different connotation