Parties and celebrations

The fourth entry is la partecipazione, and an English reader who takes it for « participation » will be wrong twice over. The card that arrives two months before a wedding is nobody taking part in anything. It is an announcement, and the noun comes from a second sense of partecipare that English « participate » never had: to make a thing known, to inform. Vi partecipiamo la nascita di Anna is printed on the card itself and means we announce to you the birth of Anna. So la partecipazione is the sheet that announces a wedding, a birth or a death, and le partecipazioni di nozze are what a couple orders from a printer. The taking-part sense is alive as well — la partecipazione al corso — and so is a third, the shareholding: una partecipazione del venti per cento. What decides between them is the frame. In an envelope on a mantelpiece the word is an announcement, in a register it is attendance, in a balance sheet it is a stake. English needs three separate words there, and « participation » covers only the middle one.