[In English] Florence: Changing to Easier Pronunciation

Q: How do you say Florence in English?

A: It is Florence.

In our series on differences in place names, today we leave the German-speaking world and head to Italy. City names in Italy are often quite different between Japanese and English. One such example is Firenze in Japanese and Florence in English.

The English word Florence came from the French word Florence. Tracing it back, it comes from the Latin personal name Flōrentia, which comes from flōrens, meaning to bloom or flourish, and further back from flōs, meaning flower. In fact, it is a word that is distantly related to the English words bloom and blossom.

On the other hand, the Japanese word Firenze came from the Italian word Firenze. The pronunciation is almost the same, so it is easy to understand. The default for place names in Japanese is to reproduce the sound close to the local pronunciation in katakana, isn't it?

However, in Italian, the parts 'fi' and 'tse' are emphasized like firentse (⚫️●⚫️), whereas in Japanese, it feels more like firentse (●⚫️●).

Firenze comes from the Old Italian Fiorenze, but tracing it back, it reaches the same Flōrentia (the locative case of Flōrentia) in Latin.

So why did words that branched from the same Latin root become Florence in French and Firenze in Italian? It is said that Italian has a tendency to dislike consonant clusters, so the second consonant 'l' in the 'fl' sequence was dropped to make it easier to pronounce.

Indeed, Italian is rare among European languages in that many words end in a vowel, and it is a language with many vowels that can basically be read as they are written in Roman characters, so it feels somewhat familiar and easy to pronounce for us Japanese speakers.

Now, let's see how the Latin word flos/floris, which means flower and is the origin of Florence/Firenze, has evolved in the various languages (Romance languages) that branched off from Latin.

Everything except Italian starts with 'fl', but in Italian, it is fiore. Italians really go their own way!

Let's look at other words as well.

The word 'flask', which I have mentioned in a previous article—referring to laboratory flasks, wicker-covered wine bottles, or thermos (vacuum flask) bottles—comes from the Late Latin word 'flasco' for a bottle, and it looks like this in the various Romance languages.

Here too, while other Romance languages use the consonant clusters 'fl' or 'fr', only Italian uses fiasco. Italians really go their own way.

By the way, for the Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician words that are frasco, the AI initially identified the etymology as the Latin word 'frascum', but no such word exists even after I checked. It continued to provide incorrect information, so I questioned it twice, and the list above is what it finally produced. I think the accuracy has improved, but if you find any points of concern, please be sure to check for yourself.

Even so, although the original Latin word was 'flascō', it became 'frasco' in Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician. I wondered if confusion between r and l is seen not only in people whose native language is Japanese or other Asian languages, but also in people who speak European languages like Spanish and Portuguese? It turns out it is not that 'l' changed to 'r', but rather that after 'l' was dropped, 'r' was added.

Well, I have never been to Italy, so I don't have any travel anecdotes, but a junior colleague of mine who loves Italy once sent me a postcard like the one in the top image from their honeymoon, so this is the scenery that always comes to mind when I think of Italy.

The Duomo is always featured on postcards of Florence. It is called Duomo di Firenze in Italian and Florence Cathedral in English, but "Duomo" is a term that refers to the cathedral representing a city. Its official name is Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, or Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower in English, which means "Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower."

That was some linguistic trivia about the city of flowers, Firenze!