Tech meets talk: Programming unveils an interesting quirk in the speech patterns of Pittsburgh's early Italian immigrants.
Last term, undergraduate Zachary Enick merged the fields of linguistics, Italian, and digital humanities to study meeting minutes from Pittsburgh's Tuscan League (1915-1971), an immigrant community organization that helped preserve Italian culture. The documents are in Italian, but Zac picked out more than 200 "loanwords," terms borrowed directly from English.
Zac theorized that this might be because there weren't sufficient Italian words with the same meaning--but interestingly enough, that was never the case! There were always Italian equivalents.
To look for patterns, he used <oXygen> markup language to identify things like the part of speech, or whether the words had been "Italianized."
The use of loanwords was generally irregular, and seemed to grow a little over time. Most often, they referred to events or committee position titles.
Zac is majoring in French Language & Literature and Italian Language & Literature, and minoring in Linguistics. He has also earned his American Sign Language Certificate.The title of his study is: "La Lega e la linguia: tracking language change over time in the Tuscan Protection League."
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