Magazen: History of a Word Told Through a Project of Digital Lexicography

Abstract

The paper presents the general structure of the research project Vocabolario storico-etimologico del veneziano (VEV), funded by the Swiss National Fund, and in particular the entry magazén, a word of Arabic origin, whose etymology and history are described in order to explain its widespread diffusion in the European languages and its peculiar semantic trajectory (from ‘storage’ to ‘wineshop’, in Venetian, and through the French word magasin, probably borrowed from Italian, to English and Global magazine ‘newspaper’).

Keywords

• Arab words in Romance. Digital lexicography. Etymology. Venetian dialect