Dizionario delle parole russe che si incontrano in italiano

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Mar-Jun 2005 by Mingati, Adalgisa

Giorgio Maria Nicolai. Dizionario delle parole russe che si incontrano in italiano. Biblioteca di cultura. Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2003. Index. 529 pp. euro30,00.

It should be mentioned in the first place that the Dizionario delle parole russe ehe s'incontrano in italiano by Giorgio Maria Nicolai (henceforth: Dizionario) is a hybrid work that brings together under the general heading of "Russisms" entries of heterogeneous nature with a largely varying frequency of use within the Italian lexicon. Upon close examination the Dizionario appears to be more of an encyclopaedic manual intended for a public consisting of Italian readers who have little knowledge of Russian language and culture, who need a means of consultation that can provide synthetic, but at the same time clear and exhaustive information on historical, social, and traditional phenomena that are often mentioned in Italian texts (translations, historical works, newspaper articles, travel notes etc.)

The Dizionario is a substantial enlargement and update of previous works by Nicolai (Le parole russe, Roma, Bulzoni 1982 e Viaggio lessicale nel Paese dei Soviet, Roma, Bulzoni 1994), but at least about a hundred entries are here taken into consideration for the first time. In my opinion, the principal value of this work consists in the copious bibliographical references, mainly to travel literature and journalistic publications, the result of extensive research carried out for more than twenty years by the author, who is a passionate student of the history of the Russian language. On the other hand, the treatment of the pronunciation of Russian terms is not completely satisfying to me. One of the main difficulties that must be tackled when using a foreign word is pronunciation, especially when this word originates from Russian. This problem is to a large degree caused by different procedures of transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet in Latin and the uncertainties of pronunciation of non-adapted loans that result from this. Alas, a phonetic transcription of the individual terms, an instrument that in my opinion is indispensable in a dictionary with the characteristics and aims set out in the work by Nicolai, is absent in this work. Although the author states that he has followed the scientific transcription that has established itself in Italy for some time now, in the introductory notes "Pronuncia delle parole russe" (pp. 17-18) he restricts himself to a short and unfortunately not always understandable presentation of the main phonetic characteristics of Russian, committing some grave errors in the process (e.g. the diacritic ["] does not always have the function of indicating a palatalized consonant, like in [s] and [z]).

Russian is among the languages that have made a conspicuous contribution to the creation of the Italian lexicon. (Among the Slavonic languages it is the foremost language in this respect.) In a classification of loans that have enriched Italian most it is surmised that Russisms occupy the fifth or sixth position, after Anglicisms, Gallicisms, Germanisms, Hispanisms, and Arabisms (p. 11 ). The vast majority of the words that are analyzed in the Dizionario belong to the specific lexical category of "necessity loans," i.e. connected to things and institutions typically Russian (a concept that is in Russian referred to by the term realija), that are untranslatable because they do not have an equivalent in Italian culture or in the culture of other European languages. On the basis of this preliminary consideration the author does not discuss, even where this in my opinion would have been possible and desirable, the not unimportant problem of translation, i.e. the search for one or two ternis that offer a satisfying equivalent in Italian. The problem of translation is discussed only incidentally and only in a few cases, like for typically Russian melioratives and appellatives (golúbuska, batjuska, matuska), for some types of clothing (kaftan) and for the nobility rank of knjaz',

The introduction in the European languages of "necessity loans" from Russian, had already started in the age of Old Russian (in the 11th-13th centuries, especially from German, as a consequence of commercial contacts that Europe maintained with Rus'), and became more intense at the beginning of the Modem Era, as correspondences and travelling accounts grew in number, the authors of which were often Italian travellers and diplomats (and, in more recent times, journalists or simply tourists). As is known, from the second half of the 19th century an exponential increase in the number of Russisms in European languages took place, in the first instance caused by the translation of the great classical Russian novels and, after the year 1917, Sovietisms were introduced, the linguistic contribution of which has largely influenced the socio-political lexicon of western languages. It should be borne in mind that a considerable number of Russisms entered Italian by the mediation of French, English, and German.