Ear, Nose and Throat Medicine

Near the end of this list stands la raucedine, and the word is worth taking apart, because half of it is already in English doing a different job. The Latin adjective raucus meant hoarse, said of a voice worn thin; from it Latin built the abstract noun raucedo, hoarseness, and that came down to Italian unchanged in sense as la raucedine. English borrowed the adjective as well, late and straight out of the books, and it became « raucous ». But it never stayed in one throat. A « raucous » laugh, a « raucous » crowd, a « raucous » party: the word now means loud, rough and disorderly, and it describes a noise made by many people rather than a complaint made by one. For the complaint English keeps its old Germanic word, « hoarseness », with no Latin in it at all. So a reader who meets ha la raucedine and hears « raucous » will picture somebody shouting, when the sentence says the opposite: a voice that has almost stopped. The adjective rauco is the one piece the two languages still share honestly.