When I started researching this video, I’d planned to do a breezy little run through of 3 bite-sized
stories about Italian history. I've done it before and thought it'd be a great way to start the year.
Light, simple, silly, perfect. However, upon diving into the first of three topics – why
Italian place names sound goofy in English – I realized I had thoughts, and a lot of angles to
cover. So instead, welcome to what is functionally the background noise inside my brain whenever
I say any place name in my videos. Because when you get a name like Firenze or Venezia,
you say it and it makes you feel all classy, oh che bella parola, tanto elegante, sono alla moda
[oh what a beautiful word, so elegant, I am very fashionable], but then you bring it down
to English and it’s Florence and Venice, which is… fine – but those aren’t the same sounds at
all. It’s weirdly flat and smushy, which is the phonetic antithesis of what makes Italian sound
so nice. Those silent Es on the end make the word feel like you gave up partway through,
I mean listen to how Roma becomes Rome, that one vowel difference robs us of a quarter the
word and half the drama! I wondered how on earth we got from that to this, and my first instinct
was to blame French. This, being my first reaction, will obviously be proven correct
because I don’t know what foreshadowing is, but as a formality let’s do the rest of the video anyway.
My logic was that the English names for
Italian places looks suspiciously similar to the French names. I mean [French accent] Rome, Milan,
Florence, Venice, they just sound like they belong in French. Surely the ironclad science of *Vibes*
would never lead me astray! I’ve studied French and Italian in school, visited both countries,
and I’m familiar with the basic phonology of each language. French is further back in the throat,
little more consonant heavy, emphasis often on the last syllable – Italian by contrast
has greater focus on open vowel sounds and more melodically varied syllable stress. That said,
every language has its own aesthetic and poetic strengths, and French sounds are
really pretty on French words: Paris sounds beautiful in its native language in a way
the Italian Parigi just doesn’t. So at this point in my brainstorming, I thought I had it:
all I had to do was establish some context about how foreign names are traded between languages,
go back through the history of French, Italian, and English to show how the languages developed,
and then simply assume that my gut assessment would remain correct with no further nuance to
undermine my flagrant Italian-language bias. Am I laying it on thick enough?
Let’s find out! Allora, cominciamo con la linguistica! [So, let’s do some Linguistics!]
Now, the topmost layer of
all this is the understanding that almost nobody calls other people what they call themselves in
their native language. For a classic example, let’s jump back to Italy’s classical Roman past
and their first interaction with Greece… famously not originally called Greece! The
people who lived there called their homeland Ελλάς or Ελλάδα, and that’s an endonym, a name
people use for themselves in their own language. However, when the big macho Romans rolled into
the southern Italian city of Cumae, the locals said they were colonists from the city of Graia,
so the Romans stopped devoting additional brain-space to anything other than ass-kicking,
and blanket-categorized everyone like them as Graeci, which became the word Greek – This is an
exonym, a name given by outsiders in a foreign language. We’re getting a little sidetracked
from our stated purpose of Italy Story but shush Romans are Italians get off my back.
So the rest of Europe picked up calling them
Graeci and the exonym has stuck all the way to the present, but Hellas has another exonym from the
opposite direction. See, from the Eastern point of view, the nearest Greeks are in Ionia, so Assyrian
and Phoenician records mention Iaunaia and Yadnana – then later on the Achaemenid Persians rolled up
and called it Yauna, naming the rest of Greece the same thing. That name later morphed into Yūnān,
and that one stuck. So to this day, speakers of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi
still refer to Greece with some form of Yunan. Now let’s not feel too bad about Greece here,
because not only does this happen to everybody, but Greece takes the cake for pejorative exonyms:
having literally invented the concept of a Barbarian to describe people who weren’t them.
Okay, now we’re getting off-track from Italy, so allow me to remedy that rapidamente [rapidly].
That’s the most basic form of linguistic name
transfer ­– some outsider comes around and creates a brand-new name based on their experiences and
opinions of a place or people, and understanding the context of those words can tell us as much
about the speaker as the thing being named. But even within one linguistic lineage, original
endonyms can diverge over time and ultimately become an exonym. So to understand the origin of
Italian place names, we need to know the origin of Italian… so we’re going back to Latin for a sec,
because after the empire in the west splintered apart in the 400s AD, the provincial variety of
Latin across Europe and North Africa got a lot more pronounced, quite literally, as local flavors
of the language evolved in isolation and diverged without the influence of the Empire. Meanwhile
medieval Greek was doing just fine because go-go-gadget Better Empire, and because of that
political stability, Greek remained remarkably consistent over a very long time in comparison.
In any case, Latin’s fragmentation gave us the modern Romance Family of Languages: often grouped
as Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian – everyone forgets Romanian, don’t forget
Romanian, be better – but it took a very long time before those modern national languages took shape:
Spanish got its first grammar book in 1492 right at the end of the Reconquista, and Italy wasn’t
unified enough to have meaningful use for a standard national language until the late 1800s,
and the further step of making everyone actually speak it took another several decades. Hey wait a
minute, is that going to cause a problem for my stated thesis? Mmmmmmmmm Nahhhh it’s fine. It's
fine, yeah.
But in between the OG Latin and the modern Big 5 there were dozens of medieval Romance languages.
Former imperial provinces in the Balkans and North Africa had their own Romance tongues that
survived until they were superseded by Germanic, Slavic, and Arabic. Meanwhile, look past the Big
5 national languages and there’s more than 20 main branches. Iberia was home to Portuguese, Galician,
Leonese, Castilian (which became modern Spanish), Aragonese, and Catalan. Then moving up the
Mediterranean coast into France, we run into the southern Occitan, then Arpitan, and the northern
Langues d’Oïl which became modern French. Then there’s Italy with the absolute highest density
of languages: Gallo-Italic in the northwest, Venetian, Rhaeto-Romance, Tuscan, Central Italian,
Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Sardinian. And most of those can be divided another 2 or 3 ways if you’re
feeling thorough.
Contrary to how they’re sometimes categorized, these are not dialects that have quirky
little differences but are otherwise mutually understandable, these are whole-ass languages that
evolved independently over more than a thousand years, with their own influences, vocabulary,
grammar constructions, and foundational pieces of literature. This makes sense when considering
Italy was many countries for a very long time, all of them fiercely independent. Standard Italian
only really became the standard in the 1900s well after unification, and the tradition of
local languages remains so strong to this day that most Italians are considered bilingual in Italian
and local. Wait hold on a second this is getting kinda comple–This is more pronounced in the far
north and south of the country with Venetian and Sicilian especially, but less common in
the center of the country near Tuscany – that’s because standard Italian is primarily based on
the Tuscan language popularized in literature by Petrarch, Dante, and Machiavelli – okay not so
much Machiavelli but he’s my guy so I gotta rep.
I say all this to explain that languages are complicated, and this is roughly when
it clicked that my beloved Lingua Italiana is a surprisingly modern development, and is
potentially not the final arbiter of what things in Italy are called. See, the gap between standard
Italian and local languages has the fascinating consequence that most Italian placenames are
Exonyms that don’t match the local Endonyms. Uh oh! For instance, Naples in Italian is Napoli,
but in local Neapolitan, Napule. Palermo is the same in English and Italian, amazing… NO,
in Sicilian it’s Palermu. Let’s try Genoa, in Italian that’s Genova, in Ligurian? Zêna. Great.
Mantua in Italian is Mantova, but the Lombard for it is back to Mantua ­– Just like Milano,
where the Milanese drops the final vowel to become Milan again. Then Venezia, la mia bella
Venezia, cosa fai… [Venice, my beautiful venice, what are you doing…] Venèsia??? O h N o.
That sure
sounds like French and English and not at all like its Standard Italian counterpart. It was at this
moment that I realized my premise was shattered, as it turns out Italian is a wildcard too,
but my shock at the notion eventually brought me to a more comprehensive understanding of
these languages. From there, the question of why English pronounces Italian names like
that is ultimately very simple – early medieval French had exonyms for Italy derived from their
Romance kinship and shared roots in Latin. Some turned out rather similar, Venise to Venésia,
while others stuck more closely to the original Latin, getting Florence from the OG Florentia
while Tuscan went rogue with Firenze. France in turn imported all that to Early English
by way of the Norman conquest, and each language continued to evolve and diverge over the following
millennium – to the point where the French and English placenames are not hideously more
off-base than the surprisingly large gap between Standard Italian and the local languages. Sure,
I like the sound of Standard Italian quite well, but I can’t pretend it’s The Only Valid Option.
So to answer my original question:
why are Italian names so weird in English? Because translation is tricky, exonyms are weird in every
language, and the Romance gang is one big vaguely-Latinate exonym soup, even in their
own countries! None of this is French’s fault, languages are just complicated and localization
is fine. If Venezia becomes Venice in English, cool. It’s fine, I’m fine, just give me a minute.
What kind of
Venice enthusiast doesn’t speak fluent Venetian, God I’m such a Dumbass! Oh, wow, look at me,
I love Italy soooo much, I can’t even read Dante in the original Tuscan because I’m such a fake
fan. Sure I can tell the difference between Tuscan and Standard Italian on sight but what’s the POINT
if I can’t read it fluently. Anyway thanks for watching I’ll see you in the next video. God.