Football Language

Yesterday Beniamin Chalupinski, MA and pursuing his Doctor degree at the University of Birmingham, went to my faculty to make a lecture regarding the Sport language in Italy. The title, "La lengua actual del deporte en Italia" [Current Sport language in Italy] was a temptation, and when football is mentioned your humble server went to check the thing.

The lecture was based on a Power point presentation and for administrative purposes the lecturer had to improvise. He made several statements regarding the nature of the foreign "invasion" of words to common usage, in this case sport. Words such as 'corner,' 'offside,' 'playmaker' and 'pole position' to name a few, invade the "specialized" journalist langugae. This is due, according to Chalupinski to several reasons; the lack of the mother tongue to produce several terms and the overwhelming presence of the English language in sports, specially football. He made clear statements based on linguistic studies based on Syntactical Structures by Chomski regarding the basis of this problem.

His lecture made me think abouth the way we approach certain things, most commonly in literature and football. In literature the equivalent would be Dante. But in Sport langugage this inclussions seem completely different. He mentioned the case of 'politically induced words' such as diporte that had a different connotation in the Second World War. He concluded his presentation with the current state of inclussion in other languages and the media-induced rejections such as France's and Germany's case.

I did understand sixty percent of the lecture due to the affinity of Italian to Spanish but even so, I could not figur out many things. This was because of the nervousness of the presentator and the quickness and my ignorance of the Italian language.

I uploaded the lecture. I recorded it, but between 1' to 10' it is the usual delay in process of reading. So if any knows Italian (Rodrigo) and would be gently of making a transcription t would be nice to share it here to the community. A translation would be very helpful also(too much to ask I know). The recording is in WAV and it lasts about 1' 14''.

Here the full lecture