Omniglot - the blog

This week we’ve had a Secret Santa style exchange of gifts at the office. Quite a few of those involved asked for the money to be donated to charity, but there were a few actual presents. Someone very generously gave me what I thought was a large cake, but have since discovered is a kind of cake-shaped bread from Milan called panettone.

The name panettone comes from the Italian word panetto, a small loaf bread. The -one end indicates it’s large, so is a “little big loaf”, and very tasty as well. Here’s a recipe, if you want to try making a panettone yourself.

pomodoro, noun = tomato

One of the things Christopher Columbus brought back from the “New World” was the tomato. People believed that tomatoes were poisonous at first, but had started to fry and eat them like eggplants (aubergines) by the beginning of the 18th century.

The Italians gave tomatoes the same nickname as eggplant, pomo di moro, which means ‘fruit of the Moors’. At that time, the Moors were often thought to have introduced new products. Over time, pomo di moro changed to pomodoro, which was mistranlated as ‘apples of gold’ (pomo d’oro) by English-speaking historians.

The English word tomato comes, via Spanish tomate, from the Nahuatl word tomatl, which means literally “the swelling fruit”. Interestingly, tomatoes were not commonly eaten in the USA until after 1830.

In Manx, a tomato is ooyl ghraih (lit. “love apple”), tomato or traase. In Irish, tomato is trátaí.

Sources
An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, by Ralph W. Fasold and Jeff Connor-Linton
www.etymonline.com

giovanissimi, noun = young teenagers

Related words:
gioventù, noun = youth
giovane, adjective = young, noun = youth, young man, girl, young woman
giovanotto, noun = young man
giovanile, adjective = youthful
i giovani, noun = the young

Antonyms
vecchio, adjective = old, noun = old man
vecchia, noun = old woman
i vecchi, noun = old people
vecchiaia, noun = old age

This word caught my eye today while working on a website in Italian. It demonstrates one aspect of Italian word formation: the intensifying ending -issim-, which you can add to most adjectives. For example, buono = good, buonissimo = very good.

When you learn a new word in a foreign language, it’s a good idea to learn related words and antonyms (words with the opposite meaning). This helps to build up your vocabulary.

I made the soundfiles with the text-to-speech program at:
http://www.pd.istc.cnr.it/FESTIVAL/home/demo-interactive.htm