Cristophe wrote:
> > >
> > > I like it. It's quite Italian looking. As far as I remember, while
> > French
> > and
> > > Spanish often use 'y' for /j/, Italian uses nearly only 'i'. I cannot
> > think of
> > > any Italian word with 'y'. Is it used in Italian Luca?
> >
> > No. Italian alphabet uses only 21 letters:
> >
> > a b c d e f g h i l m n o p q r s t u v z
> >
>
> Strange... no "j"? I thought this one at least was used in Italian... Oh
no! Now
> I remember that instead "gi" is used most often (like in Italian "giorno"
where
> French has "jour").
'j' was used sometimes to write /j/, as in Benedetto Marcello's paraphrasis
of the 10th Psalm:
'...e al bujo attendono'
where today we'd write '...e al buio attendono'.
This was used only in the xvi-xvii centuries, tho.
> > Other letters are called 'straniere' (foreigners) and used only in
> > loans.
> > Interestingly Italian had a very strong tendence to italianize
> > everything
> > foreign, even names (In philosophy, i.e., I've just studied quys as
> > Tommaso
> > Moro, Francesco Bacone and Renato Cartesio, aka Thomas More, Francis
> > Bacon
> > and René Décartes).
>
> When I think that my boyfriend is already bothered by the fact that we in
France
> write foreign names as they are originally but pronounce them in a French
way
> (which transforms Diana Ross into /Dja'na 'rOs/ for instance), he would
have
> been really mad if I had been Italian :)) ...
Unfortunately we don't do it anymore :(
> This tendence has been replaced within the last 10
> > years
> > by another tendence allowing free English loans (especially in subjects
> > as
> > Informatics and Computer Science). I hate English borrowings, also
> > because
> > they are, 90%, words English picked up from Romance langs. My father,
> > rather
> > conservative, doesn't anyway use English words. He uses 'calcolatore' or
> > 'elaboratore' instead of the evil 'computer'.
> >
>
> In French nobody uses "computer" at all. The French "ordinateur" is very
well
> established (and we don't say a laptop but a "portable").
'portatile' works very well. Indeed I didn't know that the English word for
it was 'laptop' : ) 'telefonino', 'rete', 'cellulare' are all well
established 'hightech' terms (now I wanna see if you understand what they
mean!).
Luca