QUAND LA TERMINOLOGIE MUSICALE ITALIENNE TRAVERSE LES ALPES, LA MANCHE ET LE DANUBE
WHEN THE ITALIAN MUSICAL TERMINOLOGY CROSSES THE ALPS, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL AND THE DANUBE

Summary/Abstract: The author analyses around 80 musical terms from Italian that appear in French, English, and Romanian. Music notation is a complex semiotic system in which linguistic signs occupy only a marginal place. Unlike other mixed semiotic systems, made up of words and specific scoring structures (the ‘formulas’ in mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc.), the musical sheets are not only a method of encoding the music text created by a composer, but also a set of directions for the interpreter, a kind of ‘instructions. The musical terms coined in Italian, which “travel” to other languages as loans, show remarkable semantic stability, having the same meaning in the four examined languages. In French and Romanian, the majority of Italian words were adapted to their own phonetic, morphological, and/or lexical systems. Such linguistic adaptions are rarely found in English. French occupies a special place in comparison with English and Romanian, being at times the pathway for the transfer of Italian musical terms. In some cases, the Italian words work as a model for a semantic extension of a similar word already existing in the target languages.

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