LA CIVETTA February 2016 | Page 35

The other well-known area is in music, where almost all the terms are borrowed from Italian. While

there are too many musical notations to mention here, notable examples that have come to mean

things outside of music, notably in a figurative sense in modern speech would be: crescendo, tempo,

bravura (literally meaning ‘brave’ but has come to mean ‘done with great skill’). Of course Italian

influence on English doesn't end there - due to American mob movies such as Goodfellas and The

Godfather - words like capo and capisce are occasionally used in slang speech, particularly in

America.

Lastly, we have a more oblique form of borrowing from Italian: that is, words we have borrowed

from Italian via French. Words like embassy, gazette, charlatan and masquerade have all come from

Italian (ambasciata, gazzetta, ciarlatano, and mascherata respectively), but have gone through

France before they got to England. This shows that cultural exchange between France and England

was greater than it was between England and Italy to the extent that we borrowed words that had

travelled from the Italian peninsula. As France was both a larger power and geographically closer

this is unsurprising, but it goes to show that the influence of Italian is greater and more wide-

reaching than first meets the eye, and it comes from places that we wouldn't immediately expect.

Joel Dwek

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