Archaeology and the dig

The fourteenth entry is il coccio, one word doing work that English has divided three ways. Il coccio is first the material: una pentola di coccio is an earthenware pot, fired clay, unglazed and heavy in the hand. It is then the fragment that such material becomes, which is what a trench yields by the bucket. And it is, in the plural, the pieces of anything breakable at all — ridurre in cocci is to smash something, raccogliere i cocci is to pick up what is left, of a vase or of a marriage. English makes the object decide before the word can be chosen. A fragment of pottery is a « sherd », and excavators spell it that way on purpose; a fragment of glass, or of anything else, is a « shard »; the material itself is « earthenware », or « crockery » once it is laid on a table. The two spellings earn the fuss made about them, because « potsherd » on a finds bag and « shard » in a newspaper sound alike and are not the same thing. Going into Italian the three fall into one; coming out, the thing has to be identified first.