Modern Italian Transports and Military Italian Technique: a historical linguistic study of new technical words in post-unification Italy, with an electronic edition of Alfredo Panzini’s “Dizionario Moderno”

The aim of the project is to investigate how technological and social transformations impacted on the evolution of the Italian language after the political Unification of the Country. To address this topic, the research team will examine the activity of Italian lexicographers, linguists, technicians, writers, journalists and politicians who registered new technical words and words related to new types of works trying to regulate their entry into the Italian language between the late 1800s and the 1900s. The acronym for the project is MIT@PANZINIonline = “Modern Italian Transports” (railways, motoring, aviation, navy, cycling) and “Military Italian Technique” in Panzini’s Dictionary. The main goal of the project is the publication of an electronic critical edition of “Dizionario moderno”, the most important Italian dictionary of neologisms (ten editions between 1905 and 1963). Because of the demanding philological work, the digital edition will be limited to the general list of entry words (tagged by the respective area of usage) and to some technical words related to the two sectoral areas object of study (means of transport and military vocabulary). However, a computing platform capable of hosting the complete critical edition of the dictionary will be created. The acronym hints at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thus making easily understandable what our project is about, namely the Italian language of modern technology. Though focussed on the words listed in “Dizionario moderno”, our project will expand its sources to include all post-unitary Italian dictionaries (general, methodical, sectoral, historical), newspapers and specialist literature, legal texts and Italian literary texts. The choice of the two technical languages is justified by the lack of specific historical-linguistic studies and it is consistent with the subjects of PNR. In addition to the electronic dictionary, further project outputs will be essays, articles and a final conference.