Different language, different words.

Here's a question I'm pretty sure you can't answer without the help of a decent dictionary: what is the meaning of 'parallelepiped'? I certainly couldn't.

  Yesterday whilst reading an article about Carthage in the travel section of the Corriere della Sera, I came across the word 'parallelepipedo'. Unable to guess its meaning from the context, I looked it up in an Italian - English dictionary and found the English translation left me none the wiser until I had resorted to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Stumbling across words I've never previously encountered is a fairly common occurrence when I'm reading the Corriere but a pretty rare one when I'm reading the Guardian. And when you think about it this rather odd. Both papers are targeted at the same type of reader: someone with a university or grammar school/liceo classico education, interested in current affairs and high culture. So one would assume that once a Guardian reader had learned Italian reading the Corriere would present few difficulties.

   When Jude Fawley acquires a Latin Grammar to help teach himself Latin and Greek as a necessary step towards fulfilling his ambition of winning a place at Christminster he:

'learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.'

I assume the parenthetical aside Hardy gives his narrator alludes to proto Indo-European, from which Germanic languages such as English and Romance tongues such as Italian are descended. Although English having a common ancestor with a foreign tongue is no aid to understanding, it does seem to reinforce our instinctive belief that foreign languages are simply our mother tongue written in code. Once you've gone through the 'years of plodding' and learned what are the Italian equivalents of English words and how its grammar sticks them together you're home and dry.
   Unfortunately, you discover that you're not: the pesky foreigner uses words whose English equivalents you've never heard of. His language reflects the fact that he experiences the world in a different way from us: rather than liking things, they are pleasing to him; instead of making do with the one word 'strap' like any sensible Englishman he employs half a dozen; he makes do with the same word for nephew and grandson (nipote) but has invented a special one for your child's parent-in-law (consuocero/a). In semiotic terms, when you read the Corriere the problem is often the signified, rather than simply the signifier, being alien.