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A review of historically and sociologically significant cultural interrelations between Italy and its language and the world commences with a historical sketch from the Roman period. The author examines reasons for the rebirth of interest in Italian culture and suggests that the best approach to developing an appreciation of the culture is the study of the language. Concluding remarks present an outline for a study unit on Italian culture including: (1) pre-Roman period; (2) Rome; (3) Middle Ages; (4) Renaissance; (5) Baroque, Neoclassical, and Romantic periods; (6) Italians in the United States of America; (7) twentieth century influences; and (8) contrastive linguistic study of English and Italian. A bibliography is included. (RL)

The first half of this pamphlet stresses the value of foreign language learning in general from historical and cultural points of view. The second half indicates the growing importance of Spanish in the economic and cultural spheres as an inducement to student selection of Spanish as a second language. (JH)

Les ordres mendiants ont fait de la langue latine un idiome de savoir et de théologie ; les langues vernaculaires romanes qu’ils connaissent bien lui sont subordonnées, essentiellement pour les besoins d’une pastorale de la traduction et de la translation. Il est difficile de documenter d’autres usages des langues romanes par les frères mendiants. Cette contribution s’intéresse à la contribution dominicaine à un atelier de copistes spécialisé dans la littérature en langue française et italienne entre Gênes et Pise, à la fin du XIIIe siècle. The mendicant orders have made the Latin language an idiom of knowledge and theology; due to their transnational mobility, they master romance vernacular languages and use it essentially for the needs of pastoral care and translation. It is difficult to document other uses of Romance languages by the friars. Nonetheless, this contribution aims at focusing on the Dominican contribution to a copyists' workshop specializing in French and Italian literature between Genoa and Pisa at the end of the thirteenth century.

words such as Fr. livraison ‘delivery’, It. fedeltà ‘faithfulness’, Sp. semejanza ‘resemblance’, belong to the word class of nouns. They do not possess materiality and therefore lack sensory perceivability. Within the spectrum of nouns, abstract nouns are located on the opposite side of proper names; between them, there are common nouns, collective nouns, and mass nouns. Abstract nouns are in part non-count and not able to be pluralized. In terms of meaning, there is typically a threefold division in groups: (a) Action/result nouns (e.g., Fr. lavage ‘washing’, It. giuramento ‘oath’, Sp. mordedura ‘bite’); (b) Quality nouns (e.g., Fr. dignité ‘dignity’, It. biancore ‘whiteness’, Sp. modestia ‘modesty’); and (c) Status nouns (e.g., Fr. episcopat ‘episcopate’, It. cuginanza ‘cousinhood’, Sp. almirantazgo ‘admiralship’). From a purely morphological standpoint, a classification of abstract nouns according to derivation basis appears suitable: (a) (primary) denominal abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. duché ‘dukedom’, It. linguaggio ‘language’, Sp. añada ‘vintage’); (b) (primary) deadjectival abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. folie ‘madness’, It. bellezza ‘beauty’, Sp. cortesía ‘courtesy’); and (c) (primary) deverbal abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. mouvement ‘movement’, It. scrittura ‘writing’, Sp. venganza ‘revenge’). Other abstract nouns arise from conversion, for example, Fr. le devoir ‘duty’, It. il freddo ‘coldness’, Sp. el cambio ‘change’. In light of this, the question of how far the formation of abstract nouns in Romance languages follows Latin patterns (derivation with suffixes) or whether new processes emerge is of particular interest. In addition, the individual Romance languages display different preferences in choosing abstract-forming morphological processes. On the one hand, there is a large number of Latin abstract-forming suffixes whose outcomes preserve the same function in the Romance languages, such as -ía (astrología ‘astrology’), -ura (scriptura ‘writing’), -ĭtia (pigrĭtia ‘sloth’), -io (oratio ‘speaking’). Furthermore, there is a group of Latin suffixes that gave rise to suffixes deriving abstract nouns only in Romance. Among these are, for example, -aticu (Fr. péage ‘road toll’, Sp. hallazgo ‘discovery’), -aceu (Sp. cuchillazo ‘knife thrust’), -aria (Sp. borrachera ‘drunkenness’, It. vecchiaia ‘old age’). On the other hand, suffixless processes of abstract noun formation are coming to full fruition only in Romance: The conversion of past participles (e.g., Fr. vue ‘sight’, It. dormita ‘sleep’, Sp. llegada ‘arrival’) is of special importance. The conversion of infinitives to nouns with abstract meaning is least common in Modern French (e.g., penser ‘thought’) and most common in Romanian (iertare ‘pardon’, durere ‘pain’, etc.). Deverbal noun formation without suffixes (Fr. amende ‘fine’, It. carica ‘charge’, Sp. socorro ‘help’, etc.), in contrast, is known to have developed a broad pan-Romance geographic spread.

The fate of two languages in the Balkans under conditions of language contact is discussed here. These languages, representing different branches of the Romance family, are the Ibero-Romance language Judezmo from the eastern branch and the South Danubian language Aromanian from the western branch. Both have been subject to intense contact with other languages in the Balkans but they show differential outcomes of this contact and thus differential degrees of involvement in the Balkan sprachbund. We document the similarities and differences in these outcomes, offer an explanation of their causes, and discuss the consequences they have for understanding the Balkan sprachbund.

The sound change from Latin /f/ to Old Spanish and Gascon /h/ has often been attributed to stratal influence from Basque. The motivation would be that Old Basque lacked /f/, and instead had a phoneme /h/, with which bilingual speakers replaced it when speaking in Romance. However, this hypothesis presents several difficulties. Most importantly, Navarrese Romance preserves Latin /f/, and in Basque itself, /f/ is adapted as /b/ in loanwords from Latin and Romance, not as /h/. Here we will argue that Old Basque had neither /f/ nor /h/. Instead, modern Basque /h/ derives from older */χ/. Medieval data will play an important role in establishing this. This hypothesis explains a number of morphophonological alternations, as well as some puzzling aspects in the treatment of aspiration in Romance borrowings, and it also makes it more difficult to hold to the stratal hypothesis for the Romance change /f/ > /h/.

Este trabalho analisa a marcação das categorias de direção e modo em expressões verbais de movimento em latim, português arcaico e português brasileiro vernáculo, com base na tipologia de Talmy (2000), que divide as línguas em dois padrões: verb-framed e satellite-framed. O objetivo é explorar de forma ensaística, a fim de surpreender novos problemas de pesquisa, a marcação dessas categorias nessas línguas, e formular hipóteses alternativas para explicar uma aparente mudança do português brasileiro. Com base em dados extraídos de diferentes corpora, os resultados indicam que o latim se comportou como uma típica língua s-framed (semelhante às línguas germânicas modernas); na transição para as línguas românicas modernas, houve variação entre os dois padrões (s-framed e v-framed); mais tarde, as línguas neolatinas se consolidaram como típicas línguas v-framed; hoje, porém, o vernáculo brasileiro apresenta dados consistentes que nos permitem classificá-lo como uma língua propensa ao padrão s-framed, semelhante ao latim.

The verbal periphrases constitute a typological feature of the Romance languages and they are especially frequent in the Iberoromanic languages. In the context of this paper the diachronic evolution of the Italian periphrase andare + participio passato, which has a diathetic, modal and resultative function, and its formal, but not functional equivalent in Spanish, ir + participio pasado, will be analysed. The study will focus on the analysis of semantic and functional values of these verbal constructions in different historical phases of the Italian and (European) Spanish language in order to investigate the convergences and divergences which arise between the two languages. In addition, some equivalent constructions in other Romance languages, e. g. Catalan and Portuguese, will occasionally be taken in consideration.

Este trabajo estudia monográficamente las voces perródromo, galgódromo, cinódromo y canódromo. Para ello, en primer lugar, se consideran las denominaciones utilizadas en distintas lenguas para referirse al lugar donde se celebran carreras de galgos, con especial atención a las lenguas romances (cynodròme en francés, cinodromo en italiano, canídromo en portugués, etc.). Posteriormente, se muestran los diversos sinónimos que circularon en español para designar dicha pista y se expone la pugna que tuvo lugar entre ellos. Finalmente, se examina cada uno de los sustantivos estudiados atendiendo a su difusión y su distribución geográfica.

Este trabalho tem como principal objetivo analisar o uso do pretérito imperfeito do indicativo em duas línguas românicas, o português europeu e o espanhol europeu, de modo a verificar se os seus usos, em determinados contextos, são equivalentes ou distintos. A análise baseia-se em dados recolhidos em dois repositórios linguísticos, um português (CETEMPúblico) e outro espanhol (CREA), assim como em jornais online portugueses e espanhóis. O estudo centra-se em construções condicionais com o intuito de verificar até que ponto as duas línguas convergem ou não quanto ao uso do imperfeito nestas construções. Depois da análise dos dados, observou-se que há algumas diferenças entre as duas línguas nestas construções, tendo por base as classes aspetuais com as quais o pretérito imperfeito se combina.

In Quaestiones naturales 4b.4.2 Seneca states that in early spring the weather drastically changes: in the warmer sky larger water droplets are formed and cause rain. The description of this ‘greater change’ (maior inclinatio) is linked in the manuscript tradition to two different controversial readings, temporis and aeris, which are irregularly distributed. Most recent editors have printed the first reading, but H.M. Hine is probably right to accept aeris. A careful linguistic, stemmatic and stylistic examination shows that temporis is likely to be a Medieval Latin gloss of aeris: the equivalence of both words would be difficult to justify in Classical Latin, but in Late Latin and in Medieval Latin tempus developed a climatological meaning which is explicitly found in medieval writers and glossaries and is also very widespread in Romance languages. The presence of this gloss in the hyparchetype Ψ, which is ultimately the source for most medieval copies, accounts for the irregular distribution of both readings in the manuscript tradition; this hypothesis is particularly consistent with Hine's suggestion that Ψ probably had interlinear or marginal readings. This historical investigation on the meaning of tempus is also relevant to the end of the same passage, where stylistic and linguistic evidence supports the reading tepore rather than tempore.

This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. These two languages are not perfect examples of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, in Leonard Talmy’s well-known typology, but they can nonetheless be shown to differ in a number of related respects: compared to English (and other Germanic languages), French (like other Romance languages) is quite constrained in its use of Manner-of-motion verbs. French also lacks true particles – Path satellites without a Ground that can be syntactically detached from the verb. Drawing on some of my previous research, I briefly discuss two simple but apparently sufficiently efficient corpus -based translation studies that reveal that these differences show up when we compare English texts originally written in English with English texts translated from French vs. English texts translated from German (or other Germanic languages). A third, more recent, study contrasts a single English novel with its French and Dutch translations, focusing on expressions of visual motion. Here, too, some of the basic encoding preferences (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed) that these languages exhibit for actual motion appear to apply, by and large, for visual motion. This paper also lists some precursors of Talmy, one of whom is famously linked with the linguistic relative hypothesis. It is suggested that French, because of its typological nature, may not urge its speakers to convey much detail (neither of Manner nor of Path) in the encoding of motion. It remains an open question, one that goes beyond the purview of corpus linguistics, whether this stylistic difference is matched with a deeper cognitive one.

All major Romance languages have patterns of the type jaune paille for expressing shades of colour represented by some prototypical object. The first constituent of this pattern is a colour term, while the second one designates a prototypical representative of the colour shade. The present paper starts with a short discussion of the controversial grammatical status of this pattern and its constituents. Its main aim, however, concerns the origin and diffusion of this pattern. We have not found hard and fast evidence that Medieval Italian pigment compounds of the type verderame influenced the rise of the jaune paille pattern, which first appears in French in the 16th century. This pattern continued to be a minority solution during the 17th century, but established itself during the 18th century. In the 19th century, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese adopted the pattern jaune paille, while it did not reach Catalan and Romanian before the 20th century.

espanolEste articulo examina la opinion de Benito Jeronimo Feijoo (1676‑1764) acerca del cultivo del griego y del latin en la Espana del siglo xviii. A traves de textos del Teatro critico universal (1726‑1740) y de las Cartas eruditas y curiosas (1742‑1760), se estudian, asimismo, las implicaciones y puesta en practica de esas ideas, que cuestionaban la necesidad de estudiar el griego y la limitacion del latin en la vida cientifica y cultural moderna. Puestas sobre el contexto del reformismo borbonico, se discute la influencia de un ideal casticista y nacionalista espanol en estas tesis, para concluir que el pragmatismo es el factor determinante en su preferencia de las lenguas vulgares. EnglishThis article examines Benito Jeronimo Feijoo’s (1676‑1764) opinion on the cultivation of Greek and Latin languages in the 18th Century Spain. By means of a selection of texts from his Teatro critico universal (1726‑1740) and Cartas eruditas y curiosas (1742‑1760), practical involvement of these ideas are also analysed, as they questioned the necessity of studying Greek and the limitation of Latin in modern scientific and cultural life. Placed on the context of Bourbon reformism, the article discusses the real influence of a Spanish purist, nationalistic ideal on these opinions, to conclude the essential role of pragmatism in his preference for vulgar languages.

The paper analyses the role of B. de Aldrete’s treatise “Del Origen y principio de la lengua castellana o romance que oi se usa en España” (1606) in the development of Romance philology. The XVII-century author writes about the most important aspects of internal and external history of Spanish, such as: pre-Romance Spain and substratum languages; Roman conquest and romanization; Hispanic Latin; German conquests of Spain; Arabic conquest and the Reconquista; formation of kingdoms in the north and state-building processes; sociolinguistic situation in Spain; the role of Spanish in the New World; changes from Latin to Spanish in phonetics and morphology; sources of Spanish lexis; early written texts; territorial, social, functional variation of Spanish. Apart from the aspects of Spanish philology, B. de Aldrete pays attention to the formation and functioning of Pyrenean languages: Catalan, Galician, and Portuguese. However, B. de Aldrete does not limit himself to examining Ibero-Romance languages. Many aspects of the history of Spanish are shown against a wider, Romance background, bearing in mind the earlier tradition (the Antiquity, in the first place). He also confronts Spanish with other Romance languages and Latin. The analysis of the first treatise on the history of Spanish makes one reconsider B. de Aldrete’s contribution to the development of language description models and the bases of Romance philology. The treatise sets up a model of Romance philology as a full-fledged philological discipline.

O presente trabalho buscou investigar de que maneira os contatos linguísticos e culturais com outros povos contribuíram para a formação do léxico do português brasileiro. Para tal, o corpus foi constituído a partir das diferentes denominações dadas como respostas pelos informantes a questões do Questionário Semântico-Lexical (QSL), instrumento metodológico utilizado pelo Projeto Atlas Linguístico do Brasil (ALiB), como a proposição: “Durante uma chuva podem cair bolinhas de gelo. Como chamam essa chuva?”. Para além da presença de elementos latinos, peculiares às línguas românicas, observam-se unidades lexicais no português afluentes de elementos autóctones, africanos e das línguas de imigração. Assim, propõe-se, neste artigo, uma análise, ainda que breve, das línguas que ajudaram na formação do magno edifício lexical do português brasileiro, com base nos pressupostos da Lexicografia variacional, para que assim se possa “amarrar” as narrativas históricas que compõem a história interna e externa do português brasileiro, em sua nuance vernácula.

Renaissance songs are full of sexual content, which, however, generally appears in an encoded manner. Based on a corpus of 278 texts from an anthology representing a broad range of French Renaissance songs, the article analyses the excerpts that show clear traces of sexual content from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. In a qualitative analysis, the study presents the images that describe male and female body parts, the coitus, and orgasm. It categorizes them according to the underlying techniques of codification, such as metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, metalinguistic reference, and projection, and further subdivides the metaphors into the semantic fields they originate in, such as flora and fauna, physical activity (playing, dancing, planting, fighting), objects (spear, instrument, and others) or fainting and death. Using a quantitative approach, the article shows the distribution of these images, techniques, and sexual content. The metaphor is the most frequently used technique, in terms of tokens, followed by metonymy and synecdoche. The coitus appears, again in terms of tokens, as the dominant encoded content, followed by the orgasm, and male and female body parts. The article hence delivers a corpus-based presentation and evaluation of common euphemisms used for the coding of sexuality, thus allowing a deeper understanding of French Renaissance songs as well as a systematic grasp of the early use of sexual euphemisms in French.

This paper aims to investigate the specific mechanisms that contribute to formalizing the rhetorical interpretation of interrogative sentences throughout the history of Spanish. To this end, data from a corpus of biblical translations from the 13th to the 20th centuries are analyzed. As Biblical Hebrew and Latin use explicit elements to signal direct polar questions, it is relatively easy to locate a large number of passages with interrogative sentences, and then, examine the distribution of the translation equivalents used in the Spanish versions. The interrogative particles of Hebrew and Latin thus articulate a grammaticalized procedural meaning for which Spanish does not have an equivalent explicit marker. The systematic examination of the strategies that Spanish translators use to adapt these structures to their vernacular is therefore a way of accessing the intuitions of speakers from different periods in the history of Spanish in regard to the formulation of the rhetorical interrogative.

Building up on studies that have revealed L2 transfer of imperfective meaning from one Romance language into another [Salaberry, M. R. (2005). Evidence for transfer of knowledge of aspect from L2 S...

This paper presents the fieldwork data on the interaction of actionality, aspect, and tense in counterfactual conditional clauses of the Kuban dialect of Kabardian, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language. Kabardian shows non-trivial similarities to Romance languages in its use of the Imperfective Past suffix as a marker of counterfactuality — alone or as a part of the complex marker of the Pluperfect marker where the Imperfect attaches to the Preterite (perfective past). I show that the choice between several types of marking in counterfactual protases (the plain Imperfect, the Pluperfect, and the simple Preterite) primarily depends on actional class and viewpoint aspect: perfective counterfactuals employ either the Pluperfect or the Preterite, while imperfective counterfactuals require the Imperfect, which is in line with the more general distribution of these tense-aspect forms. Theoretical implications of the tense-aspect marking in Kuban Kabardian counterfactual conditionals are also briefly discussed.

EnglishThe lack of research on the prosody of Romance languages in general, and Portuguese in particular, gives rise to the project to which this study belongs. Thanks to the emergence of new technologies, which include suitable computational tools for speech signal collection and analysis, the Prosodic Multimedia Atlas of Romance Languages, AMPER project, appeared in 1999. This project departed from an idea of Michel Contini, originally presented in Bilbao in 1991 (Contini, 1992). Several countries in Europe and Latin America participate in this project, with the general objective of describing and contrasting the prosodic variation of all Romance varieties (Romano, Contini & Lai, 2014, p. 27). The studies on Portuguese varieties, domain AMPER-POR (AMPER for European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese), are coordinated by Professor Lurdes Moutinho and are based at the University of Aveiro, Portugal (website ). The acoustic analysis of the corpora collected in the field is done with MatLab software. For this purpose, we use scripts developed for the Project and used by all AMPER researchers, allowing the researchers to manually label the voice signals and automatically extract the acoustic parameters (F0, duration and intensity) from the vocal segments. It is possible to carry out an automatic statistical treatment of the data that allows graphical representations and applications in the field of geoprosody, studies such as linguistic dialectometry (Moutinho, Coimbra, Rilliard & Romano, 2011) and cartography (Moutinho et al. 2019). For the present example, we selected two informants with only basic education and from two locations in the north-eastern part of Tras-os-Montes. Both have Portuguese as their mother tongue, although one of them is inserted in a context in which Mirandese is also spoken, while the other is not exposed to that language. This study aims to account for the possible interference of the prosody of the Mirandese language on the Portuguese in a geographical context in which the two languages coexist. We noticed some differences between these two Portuguese speakers but not notorious enough to allow us to conclude that the sociolinguistic context may have influenced their melodies. asturianuL’ausencia d’investigaciones sobro la prosodia de les llingues romaniques en xeneral, y del portugues en particular, ta na base del surdimientu del proyeutu dientro del que s’asitia esti estudiu. Gracies a la iguadura de nueves teunoloxies, qu’inxeren ferramientes computacionales amanoses pa la coyida y l’analisis de la senal de voz, surde, a lo cabero de 1999, el Atles Multimedia Prosodicu del Espaciu Romanicu, proyeutu AMPER. Esti proyeutu sofitase nuna idea de Michel Contini, presentada orixinalmente en Bilbao en 1991 (Contini, 1991). Participen nel mentau proyeutu dellos paises d’Europa y America Llatina, col oxetivu xeneral de describir y contrastar la variacion prosodica de toles variedaes romaniques (Romano, Contini & Lai, 2014, p. 27). Les variedaes portugueses, dominiu AMPER-POR (AMPER pal portugues europeu, PE, y el portugues de Brasil, PO) tan coordinaes pola profesora Lurdes Moutinho y tienen la so sede na Universida d’Aveiro en Portugal (site ). L’analisis acusticu, de los corpora recoyios nel trabayu de campu, llevase a cabu per aciu del programa MatLab. Pa ello, empleguense scripts desendolcaos pal Proyeutu y emplegaos por tolos investigadores del AMPER, que permiten etiquetar, manualmente, les senales de voz y estraer automaticamente los parametros acusticos (F0, duracion ya intensida) de los segmentos vocales. Ye posible proceder a un tratamientu estadisticu automaticu de los datos que fai posible representaciones grafiques y aplicaciones nel campu de la xeoprosodia, como la dialectometra llinguistica (Moutinho, Coimbra, Rilliard & Romano, 2011) y la cartografia (Moutinho et al., 2019). Pal presente exemplu seleicionamos dos informantes, ensin estudios superiores, de dos llugares nel nordeste tresmontanu. Tienen los dos el portugues como llingua materna, anque un d’ellos ta inxeriu nun contestu onde se fala mirandes mentanto que l’otru nun ta espuestu a esti idioma. Esti estudiu pretende dar cuenta de la posible interferencia de la prosodia de la llingua mirandesa sobro la portuguesa nun contestu xeograficu onde les dos llingues conviven. Constatamos delles diferencies ente estos dos falantes de portugues, oxetu equi del analisis, pero non tan bultables que nos dexen afitar que’l contestu sociollinguisticu pueda tar influenciando les sos melodies.

This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix -oon. The history of non-native suffix -oon is presented by means of assembling non-native suffix -oon vocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). N = 112 non-native -oon words. Three-quarters are found to be of Romance origin and one quarter of non-European origin, entering English via colonialisation. Standard non-native -oon words are identified by appeal to Trudgill’s stabilisation definition, together with an entry in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. It turns out that Standard non-native -oon words (which are few) tended to stabilise early and be of Romance etymology. A period of enregisterment c.1750-1850 is identified by means of scrutiny of non-native -oon usage in sixty novels, leading to the conclusion that four or more non-native -oons in a literary work signalled vulgarity. A link is made between the one-quarter non-European -oons brought to English via colonial trade, and the use of such -oons by non-noble merchants, traders and their customers splashing out on luxury foreign commodities. Thus, it is found that a suffix borrowed from Romance languages in the Middle English period received fresh input during the Early Modern period via non-European borrowings, resulting in sociolinguistic enregisterment in the Late Modern period.

SummaryThis study compares the Vulgar Latin Raetia, Noricum, Venetia et Histria, Pannónia Superior, Pannónia Inferior and Dalmatia with each other and their provincial capitals in relation to the hypothesized large dialectal isoglosses of Vulgar Latin, and in turn, to the modern Romance languages located in those areas, such as Western Romance, Northern Italian, Southern Italian and Eastern Romance dialects. The analysis is done on the palatal and velar vowels, the V∼B merger, intervocalic V drop, sonorization, degemination, assimilation, palatalization and final /-s/ drop. The territories of the Alps-Danube-Adria region will be classified according to their similarities to each other and their similarity to the Vulgar Latin or Romance dialects.

The aim of this paper is, first of all, to outline the contemporary uses of causal structures in Italian writing, focusing on some less canonical syntactic and textual manifestations. These non-prototypical constructs will be, then, compared with the corresponding ones in German. The analysis that will be presented are based on qualitative and quantitative data derived from corpora of Italian and German newspaper writing. As far as the Italian language, the paper will focus on the causal connective perché: after presenting its frequency of use compared to the other causal connectives, we will discuss some of its most common syntactic and informative-textual configurations, with particular reference to the case in which perché introduces an independent utterance, preceded by a strong punctuation mark. Right this last use will be observed also in German newspapers, thanks to a preliminary survey that will focus on the causal connective weil. For both languages we will consider the frequency of this peculiar use, as well as its possible forms and textual functions, in order to highlight analogies and differences between German and Italian.