In a previous article published on FIRSTonline it is seen as the feminization of professions once exercised by men alone raised a certain amount at the beginning linguistic embarrassment, and also solutions, such as "syndachess" or "judicatess", which more than to feminize seemed to have been born to make fun of. This is basically true even when you take the opposite path, namely that of masculine activities presumably female only.
The “mammo” and the “gland”
As in certain national-popular comedies, the ironic effect is due to the presumed reversal of roles: the few men who give up their career to take care of their wife and children have always been called by the newspapers “the housewife” with quotation marks, and they seem very funny, but only to us, "the nanny" or "the secretary" (in small companies, while when it comes to the head of a party the feminine suddenly sounds strange), not to mention thethe "mammo", revealing tease of the fact that, for many of us, a father who behaves in an affectionate way with his children instead of yelling if they don't know what a distributor is is still a reason for irrepressible hilarity.
Let's leave aside the "mammo", which is an invented word like "il pecoro, il mucco, il ghiando" (but not so much: in various parts of Tuscany these forms mean "the ram" as the male of the sheep, " the calf without horns" which therefore resembles the cow, and "the oak" as the tree from which the acorns fall).
The lawyer and the lawyer
In the other cases, it is quite normal that the words masculine into -o form the feminine by taking a -a: if we have the cat and the cat, the grandfather and the grandmother, the guy and the girl and, incredible, names of professions such as the tailor and the seamstress, the master and the teacher or the cook and the cook, then the lawyer and the advocate they are perfectly formed according to the rules of our language, and so the mayor and the mayor o the minister and the minister.
Indeed, the case of the lawyer is particularly obvious, since it is a substantiated past participle (the graduate and the graduate, the clerk and the clerk, the defendant and the defendant), but also the mayor and the minister have lost the inverted commas have been around for some time: after a woman went to govern the capital, after we've now had a few dozen ministers, lingering to call a woman in politics "the mayor" or "the minister" seems an ideological pique that does not it has a lot to do with equality (indeed).
The “assessor's dilemma”
Last summer, and therefore before the elections and the strange statement with which Meloni said she wanted to be called "Mr. President of the Council” as if it were a man, I was in a small town in Umbria governed by the Brothers of Italy, and so I had the opportunity to make an experiment. I was at dinner with the mayor and the head of culture, with whom I had presented a book. "But as they say", I asked in a naive curious tone, "are you the assessor or the assessor?".
"The commissioner, of course", the lady replied with a smile during the pleasant social event, "because the right feminine would be assessor, but it sounds bad." I believe that it sounds bad: that word does not exist, the assumption that masculine words in -hours they would have the feminine in -rice.
Let's try: painter-painter, sculptor-sculptress, actor-actress, manager-director, swimmer-swimmer, traitor-traitor, and so on. What results? What the words into -tor have the feminine in -trice, but the word "councillor", being devoid of /t/, cannot take this feminizing suffix. If we want to put it in terms of general linguistics, to the morpheme m. -ORE does not match the f morpheme. RICE; in strictly phonetic-phonological terms, the connection /ssr/ in Italian is not grammatical.
Maybe "counselor"?
Indeed, to be honest there are also some words in -tor which, for various reasons, do not make the feminine in -trice, for example a woman who gets in cahoots with an imposter would be "an imposter” and not “an imposter,” and Protestant churches that have welcomed women priesthood may have a pastor or “a shepherdess”, but not “a shepherdess”.
To reformulate the question in phonological terms, the presence of /s/ prevents the alternation -TORE / -TRICE, even though /str/ is perfectly admitted by Italian in many other positions, from "ancestral" to "pipistrello", up to "strangeness".
Now, the solutions to the “assessor's dilemma", are two: you can use the suffix -it, as in "doctor, professor", getting "assessor”, a word which, however, includes a little too many /ss/ not to be a little cacophonous, or is transformed -hours in –Now getting "councilor”, which is perfectly formed if the “impostor / imposter, shepherd / shepherdess” system is considered acceptable (and productive).
The absolute normality and regularity of female words
Thinking about it, the key to the fortune of the new female forms, such as "lawyer, mayor, minister, councilor", seems to lie right there: in their absolute normality. Exactly as "the gland”, which may seem funny to those who judge it looking at it from outside the system in which it was born (i.e. the Tuscan of certain places and environments) but will seem perfectly normal judging it from the inside, because it is formed according to the rules: if the apple tree apples and the pear tree gives pears, the acorn gives acorns, and here we can designate the oak with this term.
Returning to Italian, the normality of female forms in -a it is such that these forms are visibly expanding: until recently it would have been impossible to hear on television about a "politician" who wants to become "secretary" of the Democratic Party, and instead it is what we have heard recently.
The sentence broke two hitherto rather solid barriers, namely the fact that "politics” is already the noun indicating the activity of governing the polis, so it didn't seem too probable that it could also be used as a feminine form of "the politician", while "Secretary”, as we have seen, so far suggested typing and archiving, certainly not the head of a party. Yet we're here now, despite someone lingering in rearguard battles.
The nation has chosen
It is generally not prudent to formulate clear-cut forecasts in a field such as the use of language which, as a communication tool for a vast and stratified collective (in the case of Italian we are still thinking of about 60 million people), can take even unexpected folds, but it is probable that certain punctuals out of time can at most delay the ongoing evolution, without being able to turn back the hands of the clock.
The feminization of business names recently desegregate is now at a good stage, and follows internal rules of the Italian language widely applied in all other areas: the Prime Minister may not like this, but it seems that the "Nation" has already chosen.
We eagerly await the next circular.
. . .
Daniele Vitali, from Bologna, was a translator for the European Commission for years. He has to his credit various glottology works on languages and dialects, including “Linguistic portraits: the Romanian” (Inter @ lia 2002), “Do you speak Italian-Luxembourgish? Notes on the language of the Italians of Luxembourg” (Inter@lia 2009), “Russian pronunciation for Italians” (with Luciano Canepari, Aracne 2013), as well as the great “Dizionario Bolognese-Italiano Italiano-Bolognese” (Pendragon 2007 and 2009, with Luigi Lepri), “Emilian dialects and Tuscan dialects. Linguistic interactions between Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany” (Pendragon 2020) and “Mé a dscårr in bulgnaiṡ. Manual for learning the Bolognese dialect” (Pendragon 2022).
