Many words of Latin origin are used in the English language. It must have happened to everyone, at least once, to hear “mass mìdia” (pronounced this way), or “mìdia player” and “social mìdia” mentioned on TV or in a conversation. It sounds English, it sounds English and so we often pronounce it the English way. The word “media”, however, derives from the Latin “medium”, i.e. means, of which it is plural (it therefore means “means”). We could therefore pronounce it “average”, yet as with other words that seem English to us we tend to change the pronunciation: it happens for video, audio, free, bonuses, sponsor, plus, deficit, summit and so on. Linguists also call them return latinisms, that is, words of Latin origin that arrive in the Italian language after a journey through another linguistic system, generally English. Let’s see what they are, to give them the correct pronunciation.
Hidden Latin verbs and professions
Many of the words we use as nouns today come from Latin verbs and in fact bring with them actions. Video is nothing more than the first person of the verb vidēre: means, literally, “I see”, even if it comes to us through English mediation. And so audio is «I listen», from audit.
The word exit, the classic luminous writing above the emergency exits, is among the most well-known and used English words, but in turn comes from Latin: it is in fact a form of the verb exit«to go out», and literally means «(he) goes out».
Deficit means «lacks» (from the verb deficĕre): the budget deficit is, literally, what is “missing” in the accounts. In this case it doesn’t come from English, but from French.
Placebo is an «I will like it» (future of pleasures): the drug without active ingredient and the medical term (which entered the vocabulary only in the 18th century) have their origins in the Latin phrase Placebo Domino, “I will please the Lord”, which appears in the Vulgate at the beginning of Psalm 116. It was later associated with the liturgy of the dead and subsequently acquired the meaning of something administered more to please the patient than to cure him.
Veto is «I forbid» (from to vet): when a permanent member of the UN Security Council vetoes, he is literally saying “I oppose”.
Recipe, which in English today we associate above all with the cooking recipe, was originally the imperative of recipere: “you take!”.
Sponsor comes from respond«to solemnly promise»: he was the guarantor, the one who acted as guarantor of a promise (from the same root come groom and bride, the promised).
The computer monitor shares its origin with those who “warn”: from monerewas the advisor, the one who warns and recalls, and comes to Italian directly from English.
And the tutor in Latin was the protector, from tueri«protect, supervise». The Latin word is actually the basis of two forms coexisting in the common language: the Italian tutor, attested since 1300, and the unadapted Latinism «tutor», which returned through English in the twentieth century.
Adverbs, gerundives and plurals
Plus in Latin means “more”, the comparative of mult. Used today with the meaning of “something extra”, “added value”, it arrived in Italian through the international circulation of the term, with especially French, English and German mediations. The Anglicized pronunciation «plas» is now widespread in some uses, especially advertising, while the Italian pronunciation adhering to the Latin form is plus.
The words that end in -um and -nda, such as agenda and referendum, deserve a separate chapter: they are what Latinists call gerundives, a form that expresses duty, necessity. Agenda (plural neuter gerundive) means “things that need to be done” (da act«do»), to be done; referendum (neuter gerundive singular noun) means “that which must be reported” (from refer): a question that must be “reported” to the people so that they can decide.
Last, but not least, the word tandem, the two-seater bicycle on which you pedal one behind the other. Tandemin Latin, is an adverb that means “finally”, “in the end” and in English it was translated as at lengtha double meaning expression that means both “in the end, in the long run” and “for the entire length”. The English, playing on the double meaning, christened a light carriage pulled by two horses in tandem, and then the term was extended to the two-seater vehicle, and then to the bicycle where two people sit along the entire length of the frame.
For the plural curriculum, many use the ductus curriculum, which is the true Latin plural, while the Accademia della Crusca now also lists the curriculum in the singular and the Italianized form as acceptable curricula.
What are «return Latinisms» and how to pronounce them
The English language is not a pure Germanic block, but has absorbed many Latin words over the centuries, partly directly and partly through French (which in turn derives from Latin), as well as through other routes of cultured transmission. Thanks to the use of the English-speaking world, these words spread and became popular, before returning to Italy: they have been defined, among other things, as return latinisms or xenolatinisms (from xenosin Greek, in fact, foreign), and given the immediate origin, it comes naturally for us to pronounce them in the same way in which they are returned to us.
As the Accademia della Crusca explains, «English has a very particular role: if it is known to everyone that, starting from the twentieth century, it has been the language that has conveyed the greatest number of new words entering other languages, perhaps it is not equally well known that, after Italian, English is the language that, in the course of its history, has exploited Latin the most for the recovery and coining of new words, so much so that Tullio De Mauro defined it as “the most latinized and neo-latinized language of the non-neo-Latin world”.
So how should we pronounce a word like “media” or “summit”? In contemporary Italian both pronunciations are documented; their evaluation changes depending on the dictionary consulted. According to the Treccani Vocabulary, the correct pronunciation and faithful to the Latin etymology is mèdia, with the e open and full (exactly as we would say arithmetic mean). The mìdia form, Treccani admits, is now “very frequent”, but it is derived from English and is not recommended. The dictionaries, however, do not agree: the DOP and the Sabatini-Coletti favor the English pronunciation, while the GRADIT records both and puts the Latin one first, while the Grande dictionary of the Italian language on the other hand does not comment on the pronunciation of «media» and records the English one for «summit».
In summary, both pronunciations are accepted, but knowing that Latin is behind it can change our perspective. The same goes for plus and minus, to be pronounced as we write them or «plas» and «mainas» in English. Junior and senior (younger and older) are also originally junior And senior. The English pronunciation is «giùnior». Bonus, which is simply the Latin adjective for “good”, is bònus.
Among the words of Latin origin that we mention most often, keeping the pronunciation intact, there is virus, which in Latin means “poison”, “poisonous juice”. In this case, Italian has retained a different pronunciation from English. The reasons for this difference should be reconstructed through the history of the word and its registration in dictionaries.
