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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

The Italian influence on France since the Middle Ages has been vast and underappreciated. I speak French and I like learning the etymology of words with a good dictionary, and I am astounded at how many ordinary French terms are actually borrowings from Italian.

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Italy was the cool culture (or rather, the cool cultures) to emulate during the Renaissance; some borrowing is not that strange. A lot of artists and intellectuals felt they needed to travel Italy at that time and until the romantics in the 19th century, so they were lots of contacts besides the Italian wars.

Purely out of curiosity, which words surprised you the most? AFAIK etymology for a lot of them are quite murky, but off the top of my head, “quarantaine” is a nice one. Even though they prefer “quatorzaine” these days...

> Purely out of curiosity, which words surprised you the most?

Bank (banque) is a fun one. It comes from the Lombard money lenders who used benches as makeshift tables. That's also why the root of the word is germanic despite coming from Italy.

I didn’t know that. Nice one!

The word “bankrupt” comes from the process of ritually breaking said benches of a merchant who couldn’t make due on their debts.

That’s especially a fun one because it’s true even though it sounds totally apocryphal.

Wikipedia and Etymonline label it as a probably folk etymology.

Alas. It was a good anecdote, past tense.

Shucks. I went for a quick google which seemed to confirm, but oh well.

That is so interesting! It has also found its way into the vocabulary of regional Indian languages, via the Portuguese[0]. Pronounced "baak", it's a common word to denote school benches.

[0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AC%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%95

I had blogged about the origin of the word here:

Bank of America to rebuild tech stack with Python at core:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/10/bank-of-america-to-rebui...

The third comment on the post is also about the word bankrupt, although said to be a folk etmyology here.

The (eastern) Roman Empire was cool, because it was sitting in the middle of eurasian trade. Then Byzantium fell, and merchants (and hence artisans and scholars) fled to the other end of the mediterranean trade routes (less a Renaissance than a Déménagement), and Italy was cool. Then some atlantic countries figured out how to sail to asia, and they were cool...

I am curious how you check to be sure the words are not just from ancient latin?

Because Italian shows different reflexes of Vulgar Latin phonemes then French does. So if a word is present in French with a phonetic outcome different from most words of Latin origin in French, then you can tell it is a later borrowing. Also sometimes you can trace the slow spread of an Italian word first to the medieval Occitan dialects spoken in southern France, and then only later into French spoken further north.

Thanks.

Well appreciated in fact, for over 2000 years. You know ... Rome.

My post wasn't referring to the impact of the Roman Empire in terms of originally bringing Latin to France which, of course, everyone knows about. Rather, I was referring to the later wave of Italian > French borrowings post AD 1000 when Latin had long since diverged into the different Romance languages, and Italian was considered a prestige language in certain contexts.

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