science

Italian Eritrean

Italian Eritrean is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Italian Eritrean rather than just read about it. In short: Italian Pidgin in Eritrea (or Italian Eritrean, as is often called) also known as Asmara Pidgin Italian or Simplified Italian of Ethiopia (SIE) was a pidgin language used in Italian Eritrea and Eritrea Governorate when Eritrea was a colony of Italy (and until the 1970s in the Asmara region). History This pidgin (sometimes also called "Simplified Pidgin Italian of Eritrea") started to be created at the end of the 19t…

Key takeaways

Italian Eritrean belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Italian Eritrean to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Italian Eritrean from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Italian Pidgin in Eritrea (or Italian Eritrean, as is often called) also known as Asmara Pidgin Italian or Simplified Italian of Ethiopia (SIE) was a pidgin language used in Italian Eritrea and Eritrea Governorate when Eritrea was a colony of Italy (and until the 1970s in the Asmara region).

History This pidgin (sometimes also called "Simplified Pidgin Italian of Eritrea") started to be created at the end of the 19th century and was fully developed in the 1930s. It had similarities with the Mediterranean Lingua Franca.

Lingua Franca also seems to have affected other languages. Italian Pidgin in Eritrea, for instance, displayed some remarkable similarities with it, in particular the use of Italian participles as past or perfective markers. It seems reasonable to assume that these similarities have been transmitted through Italian "foreigner talk" stereotypes. In 1940 nearly all the local population of Asmara (the capital of Eritrea) spoke the Eritrean Pidgin Italian when communicating with the Italian colonists. Until the late 1970s this pidgin was still in use by some native Eritreans, but currently it is considered extinguished (even if a few old Eritreans still understand it in Asmara). About the Italian Eritrean Habte-Mariam wrote that: “[…] at the initial stage of their contact […] It seems likely that the Italians simplified the grammar of the language they used with underlings at this stage, but they did not borrow vocabulary and grammatical forms from Amharic and Tigrinya, since it does not show up in the 'simplified Italian' used today”. Habte wrote that it was used not only between native Eritreans and Italians, but also between different tribes in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The linguists G. Gilbert & Lionel Bender called this pidgin a "Simplified Italian of Eritrea" and wrote that: "Simplified Italian of Eritrea" is definitely a pidgin; it is described by Habte as a “relatively variable form of Italian” (1976:179). Habte’s account of its sociolinguistic setting (1976: 170-4) and what we know of recent Eritrean history make it quite clear that it is not likely to become a creole, and in fact seems likely to die out within the next generation or two. For them the Simplified Italian of Eritrea "has basic SVO order; unmarked form is used for nonspecific; stare and ce (from Italian) as locatives".

Examples The lexicon and syntaxes of the Italian Eritrean Pidgin was described by Saul Hoffmann in Il lascito linguistico italiano. Examples:

luy andato lospεdale; in Italian: È andato all’ospedale (in English: he has gone to the hospital) o bεrduto soldi ki tu dato bεr me; in Italian: ho perso i soldi che mi hai dato (in English: I have lost the money you gave me) iyo non ce/aβere makkina; in Italian: non ho la macchina (in English: I don't have the car)

Current situation of Italian Italian is still widely spoken and understood and remains a principal language in commerce and education in Eritrea; until 2020, the capital city Asmara still had an Italian-language school since the colonial decades. People born in Italy and who have children born in Italian Eritrea (who speak Italian and have formed communities in Eritrea) maintain associations of Italo-Eritreans in Italy.

The Italian language that affirms in Eritrea during the twentieth century instead presents itself as a single whole, but remaining different from the languages spoken in the rest of the peninsula; it sounds like a regional variant and yet it can not be traced back to any of the Italian regions. It possesses typically northern Italian features such as the use of the s intervocalic sound, in words like casa, rosa, cosa, but perhaps the most distinctive trait I have observed in many Italian speakers born in Eritrea, or of bilingual Italian-Tigrine Eritreans, it is the articulation of sounds that tends to be guttural in the same way as the language spoken in Eritrea, the "Tigrinya". It is as if all the sounds moved from the front to the back of the palate; the effect on the mother tongue listener is surprising given that in Italy nobody speaks in this way. This phenomenon can be ascribed to the Tigrinya linguistic substratum for cases of bilingualism; in the case instead of the Italians born and raised in Eritrea - who do not speak Tigrinya - we can perhaps trace the ancient Eritrean nurses, probably bilingual, with whom Italian children spent a lot of time and from which they probably learned to pronounce the sounds in Italian. Another characteristic element is the elision of the final vowel to the first plural person of verbs such as 'essere' and 'avere': "siam pronti, abbiam fretta". It is still used today in some linguistic areas of Northern Italy even if at the ear of the third millennium it sounds vaguely nineteenth-century, not to mention literary; it was probably imposed in the initial phase of colonization and remained unchanged through the decades.

Language characteristics While phonology and intonation are affected by native Eritrean languages, including Tigrinya and Arabic, Eritrean Pidgin Italian is based on standard European form. The Italian lexicon in Eritrea has some loanwords of Tigrinya and Arabic origin (the latter especially includes Islamic terms). On the other hand, the Italian languages has given to the Tigrinya language many hundreds of loanwords. The following are a few of these loanwords:

Eritrean - Italian (English)

asheto - aceto (vinegar) arransci - arancia (orange) bishcoti - biscotti (biscuit/cookie) bani - pane (bread) cancello - cancello (gate) dolsce - dolce (cake) forchetta - forchetta (fork) macchina - macchina (car) malmalata - marmellata (marmalade/jam) salata - insalata (salad) gazeta - giornale (newspaper) borta - porta (door) calsi - calze (socks) benzin - benzina (petrol/gasoline) balaso - palazzo (building) barberi - barbiere (barber) falegnamo - falegname (carpenter) escala - scala (stairs) coborta - coperta (blanket)

See also Simplified Italian of Somalia Simplified Italian of Libya Simplified Italian of Ethiopia Mediterranean Lingua Franca Italian language in Somalia

Notes

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Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Italian Eritrean

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Italian Eritrean claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Italian Eritrean before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Italian Eritrean ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Italian Eritrean

In research: Italian Eritrean appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Italian Eritrean in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Italian Eritrean is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Extinct languages of Africa, Geographical distribution of the Italian language, Italian-language dialects, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Italian Eritrean outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Italian Eritrean in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Italian Eritrean means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Italian Eritrean out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Italian Eritrean in simple terms?

Why does Italian Eritrean matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Italian Eritrean?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Italian Eritrean.