Texas Hold’em Anglicisms in Italian

Authors

  • Paola Brusasco Università degli Studi di Torino

Keywords:

gambling, poker, Texas Hold’em, Anglicisms

Abstract

Although gambling has a long tradition and evidence of its practice can be found even in antiquity, the game of poker – initially associated with US casinos – consolidated its present form and spread all over the world only in the 20thcentury. The late 1990s, when technology allowed poker to go online, marked the birth of a mass phenomenon attracting millions of players anywhere Internet connections were available. Interest in the game and the potential for big wins at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas and other tournaments have resulted in the birth of communities of professionals and amateur players with their own specialised language. This paper deals with the English terms typical of the variety of poker known as Texas Hold’em which have filtered into the Italian language as direct and indirect borrowings. A small corpus of Anglicisms has been collected from Italian dictionaries and official regulations. Although only few English poker terms are registered in Italian dictionaries, their number is much higher in official regulations, where they are sometimes accompanied by Italian translation equivalents, but more often used in their original or derived forms. Such difference indicates that the influence of English in this specialised area of vocabulary is rapidly growing, with terms and phrases being assimilated as part of the jargon of poker circles and regular players.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Arnold, P. (1977). The Encyclopedia of Gambling. Secaucus: Chartwell Books.

Bookless, T. C. (1982). Towards a Semantic Description of English Loan Words in Spanish. Quinquereme, 5(2), 170-185.

De Mauro, T. (1999). Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso. 6 vols + cd-rom (GDU 2007). Torino: UTET.

Devoto, G. & Oli, G. C. (2016). Il Devoto-Oli. Vocabolario della lingua italiana 2017. (L. Serianni & M. Trifone eds.). Milano: Le Monnier.

Federazione Italiana Gioco Poker (FIGP) (2012). Texas Hold’em – Torneo. Regolamento di gioco. Versione 2.0 <http://www.figp.it> [15/06/2015].

Federazione Italiana Gioco Poker (FIGP) (2014). Texas Hold’em – Torneo. Regolamento di gioco. Versione 2.1 <http://www.pokertexano.name/regole-tornei-poker-texas-holdem.php> [10/06/2017]; <http://www.figp.it> [05/09/2017].

Furiassi, C. (2010). False Anglicisms in Italian. Monza: Polimetrica.

Görlach, M. (Ed.) (2001). A Dictionary of European Anglicisms. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Gottlieb, H. (2005). Anglicisms and Translation. In G. Anderman & M. Rogers (Eds.), In and Out of English: For Better, For Worse? (pp. 161-184). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Gottlieb, H. (2012). Phraseology in flux. Danish Anglicisms beneath the surface. In C. Furiassi, V. Pulcini & F. Rodríguez González (Eds.), The Anglicization of European Lexis (pp. 169-198). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Hogan, M. J. (1987). The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Iamartino, G. (2001). La contrastività italiano-inglese in prospettiva storica. Rassegna italiana di Linguistica Applicata (RILA), 33(2-3), 7-130.

Mandelli, R. (2012). Al casinò con Mussolini. Gioco d’azzardo, massoneria ed esoterismo intorno all’ombra di Matteotti. Torino: Lindau.

[Merriam Webster] Gove, P. B. (Ed.) (1993). Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. Cologne: Könemann.

Onysko, A. & Winter-Froemel, E. (2011). Necessary loans – luxury loans? Exploring the pragmatic dimension of borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1550-1567.

Oxford English Dictionary. <http://www.oed.com> [August 2017].

Pescatori, M. & De Toffoli, D. (2009). Giocare e vincere a poker online. Milano: Sperling & Kupfer.

Poker Tournament Directors Association (2015). 2015 Rules. Version 1.0. <http://www.pokertda.com/poker-tda-rules> [08/09/2017].

Pulcini, V. (1997). Attitudes toward the spread of English in Italy, World Englishes, 16(1), 77-85.

Pulcini, V. (2002). Italian. In M. Görlach (Ed.), English in Europe (pp. 151-167). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Pulcini, V. (2017). Anglicisms in Italian: Moving on into the third millennium. In C. Boggio & A. Molino (Eds.), English in Italy: Linguistic, educational and professional challenges. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 13-35.

Pulcini, V. (forthcoming). The English language and Anglo-American culture in Twentieth-Century Italy. In G. Bonsaver, A. Carlucci & M. Reza (Eds.), Understanding Cultural Change: Language and Narrative between Italy and the USA. Oxford: Legenda.

Pulcini, V., Furiassi, C. & Rodríguez González, F. (2012). The Lexical Influence of English on European Languages: From Words to Phraseology. In C. Furiassi, V. Pulcini & F. Rodríguez González (Eds.), The Anglicization of European Lexis (pp. 1-24). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Pulcini, V. & Milani, M. (2017). Neo-classical Combining Forms in English loanwords: Evidence from Italian, ESP Across Cultures, 14.

Pulcini, V. & Scarpino, C. (2017). The Treatment of Grammatical Information on Anglicisms in Some Italian Dictionaries. International Journal of Lexicography, 30(4), 504-519. (advance access August 2016 doi: 10.1093/ijl/ecw034) https://academic.oup.com/ijl/article/30/4/ 504/2555493?guestAccessKey=ea507b7b-802f-4371-95ad-974ef0e98bde

Rodríguez González, F. (1996). Functions of anglicisms in contemporary Spanish. Cahiers de Lexicologie, 68(1), 107-128.

Sabatini, F. & Coletti, V. (2013). Il nuovo Sabatini-Coletti. Dizionario della Lingua Italiana. Firenze/Milano: Sansoni/RCS.

Thompson, W.N. (2015). Gambling in America. An Encyclopedia of History, Issues and Society. Second Edition. Santa Barbara/Denver/Oxford: ABC-CLIO.

Winter-Froemel, E. & Onysko, A. (2012). Proposing a pragmatic distinction for lexical Anglicisms. In C. Furiassi, V. Pulcini & F. Rodríguez González (Eds.), The Anglicization of European Lexis (pp. 43-64). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Winford, D. (2003). An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Zingarelli, N. (2017). Lo Zingarelli 2018. Vocabolario della lingua italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli.

Published

2018-05-28

How to Cite

Brusasco, P. (2018). Texas Hold’em Anglicisms in Italian. Revista De Lenguas Para Fines Específicos, 24(1), 47–70. Retrieved from https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/957

Issue

Section

Sección Monográfica/Special Issue