LA LINGUA DEL IESSE. OSSERVAZIONI LINGUISTICHE NELL’«ITALIA RANDAGIA» DI AMY BERNARDY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nel 1913 Amy Bernardy (1880-1959), giornalista e storica fiorentina, scrive Italia randagia, resoconto dettagliato della situazione materiale e morale degli emigrati italiani negli Stati Uniti. Poco frequentata dall’ambiente accademico, che le dedica – soprattutto in anni recenti – studi di natura prevalentemente biografico-letteraria, la Bernardy è la prima giornalista ad offrire nei suoi scritti uno spaccato fedele della vita delle comunità italiane d’oltreoceano (cfr. Prezzolini 1960). Delle rare fonti oggi a disposizione, pochissime sembrano soffermarsi sull’attenzione riservata dalla Bernardy alla questione linguistica degli immigrati italiani in Nord America. Il contributo si propone dunque di fornire, in una prospettiva storico-linguistica, un close reading di quei capitoli che in Italia randagia esaminano i tratti di un inglese «rivestito di forme italiane» (Bernardy, 1913: 89), che, se nelle sue espressioni individuali perde gradualmente i caratteri identitari, nelle sue manifestazioni collettive resta invece saldamente ancorato alla propria italianità. I tentativi di adattamento al nuovo contesto sociale e culturale si declinano e si coniugano in una lingua dai tratti confusi, «italiana d’aspetto» e «inglese d’etimologia» (p. 91): è l’«italiano del sì» che progressivamente diventa «italiano del iesse» (p. 93). The language of iesse. Linguistic observations in Amy Bernardy’s Italia randagia In 1913, Florentine journalist and historian Amy Bernardy (1880-1959) published Italia randagia, a detailed account of the material and moral conditions of Italian emigrants in the United States. Although largely overlooked by the academic community, which has only recently dedicated predominantly biographical-literary studies to her work, Bernardy was the first journalist to provide a faithful depiction of the lives of Italian communities overseas (see Prezzolini 1960). Of the rare available sources, very few focus on Bernardy’s attention to the linguistic issues faced by Italian immigrants in North America. This paper aims to offer a close reading, from a historical-linguistic perspective, of the chapters in Italia randagia that examine the characteristics of an English «rivestito di forme italiane» (Bernardy, 1913: 89), a language that, while gradually losing its identity on an individual level, remains collectively anchored to its Italian roots. The attempts to adapt to the new social and cultural context are reflected in a language with blurred features, «italiana d’aspetto» and «inglese d’etimologia» (p. 91). This linguistic shift marks the transition from the «italiano del sì» to the «italiano del iesse» (p. 93).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".