It often happens to be used borrowings from French in the Italian language without thinking too much. Many of these terms have entered common use, especially in fields such as fashion, gastronomy, the world of work… Precisely for this reason they are so familiar to the Italian speaker that they have acquired a pronunciation in standard Italian different from French, “Italianized” and adapted to our phonetics, as with “garage” and “carpet”.
But why is the pronunciation different from the French one? The reason is simple: when a word passes from one language to another it never transfers “intact”, but comes adapted to soundsto the habits and phonetic rules of the language that hosts it. In the case of French, the distance is particularly evident, because the phonetic system French includes some sounds (such as the uvular “r” or nasal vowels) that do not exist in Italian. Such sounds must therefore be adapted to come into use. Each language tends to modify foreign sounds to make them compatible with its own phonetic system.
Pronouncing loans according to “adapted” phonetics is not an error but a simple testimony of how languages interact with each other. However, let’s look at five French words that we use every day and that we almost always pronounce “Italian-style”.
Music box
The word music box it entered Italian to indicate both a system of bells and a musical box.
The most widespread Italian pronunciation is “music box” (IPA: /ka.rilˈlon/), with the final “n” clearly marked. However, it is enough to look at the original French pronunciation (IPA: /kaʁijɔ̃/) to notice the difference: the word ends with a nasal vowel, which in French is usually indicated by graphemes ‘vowel + n’ (e.g.: on, an, en), so in reality its exact pronunciation would be more similar to “carillõ”, without an actual pronounced “n”.
In Italian we tend to pronounce the final consonants, which in French are only graphic or nasalized, hence the difference in pronunciation. The same phenomenon also happens with some loans from Englishwhich in turn entered centuries ago as borrowings from French: an example is marketingin Italian (/’mar.ke.tiŋg/) while in English (ˈmɑːrkətɪŋ/).
Internship
The word internship (from ancient fr estage) is one of the most interesting examples, because it oscillates in Italian between two different pronunciations. Currently the term indicates a period of practical training
According to the Accademia della Crusca, the term must be geolocalized in medieval Latin spoken in the French area. Originally it was a phrase: season doWhere season indicated both the residence and the act of residing (from Latin stay). The expression in short meant keeping one’s home in a place to which a benefit is linked, it indicated the permanence of a vassal at the lord’s home, for the purpose of carrying out services linked to obtaining the feudal benefit.
Over time he first entered the Middle English as internshipto then arrive to the present day with the meaning of “training period” in the workplace, and beyond.
The original French pronunciation would be IPA: /staʒ/ with the soft sound /ʒ/ (as in “garage”). However, many Italians pronounce it like English (IPA: /ˈsteɪdʒ/), creating a sort of linguistic hybrid (and perhaps in doing so contributes to the historic Anglo-French rivalry).
This double use demonstrates how foreign words can change identity depending on the cultural context and how some modern words actually have very ancient origins.
Vol-au-vent
The French have contributed enormously to the world of gastronomy from a linguistic point of view. One of their most popular inventions are the vol-au-vent, wrappers made up of overlapping puff pastry disks, hollow at the top and empty inside, which can be filled with practically any filling, from sweet to savory.
THE vol-au-vent they are certainly among the most famous products of French cuisine, to be served hot or cold, as an appetizer or aperitif,
More than a term, correctly speaking it is a French phrasewhich in Italian is often pronounced in the most varied ways: sometimes as we read “volovònt” (/vol.o.’vont/) with all the consonants well pronounced, other times trying to recall the nasal sound “volaven” (/vol.a.’vɛn/). In French, however, the pronunciation remains much more fluid and simplified: /vɒl.əʊˈvɑ̃/ with many unpronounced letters.
Vintage
Even though today it is perceived as an English word, vintage etymologically it comes from French.
The term comes from Old French revenge (literally “harvest”) used since the mid-fifteenth century to indicate a wine of the highest quality, vintage or vintage. Due to closeness of meaning, therefore, some adjectival phrases such as “vintage” or “vintage” could be valid substitutes to indicate a product that is not “old and poor quality”, but rather “ancient and of quality”. The French term, however, has a certain semantic load difficult to replace by similar expressions.
According to Crusca the correct pronunciation to apply in Italian is “in English” vintigg (/ˈvɪn
