Family history

La variante grafica is the spelling variant, and the noun inside it travels a good deal further in Italian than « variant » ever does in English. On this page the two words agree: a surname copied by four clerks comes back as four varianti grafiche, and that is exactly what an English genealogist means by the term. But la variante also does a job with nothing abstract about it at all. It is a stretch of road built to go round an obstacle: la variante di valico is the new pass road, and a lorry sent along una variante has been sent round a town rather than through it. English calls that a bypass, a diversion or a relief road, and never a variant. The same Italian word covers an amendment to a contract, a different line in a chess opening and a second way of making a dish. So the rule for reading it is the concrete one. Whenever la variante is something a vehicle can drive on, no English sentence containing « variant » will be right, and the word has to be changed outright rather than carried across.