Archives and records

The nineteenth entry is l’intervista di storia orale, and the first noun has travelled much further than it looks. To an Italian eye it seems homemade, because la vista sits inside it and inter- is an ordinary prefix, so the word reads as a seeing of one another. That reading is right about the sense and wrong about the history. The starting point was French: entrevue, from s’entrevoir, to catch sight of each other, the arranged meeting of two people face to face. English borrowed it in the sixteenth century as « interview », kept the appointment, and much later handed the word to the press, where it became the printed conversation everybody now pictures. Italian then took it back in the nineteenth century from English rather than from French, and dressed it in a familiar ending: intervista, feminine, with the verb intervistare and the agent noun l’intervistatore built on it afterwards. The pieces are Latin and shared, then, but the shape is borrowed, and the word an archivist uses for a recorded life story has been round Europe once before arriving in this list.