Speech and language therapy

The sixth entry is la difficoltà di denominazione, and the long noun in the middle is a false friend that gives no warning at all, because the English cognate exists and looks identical. La denominazione is simply the act of giving a name, or the name arrived at: la denominazione della via, la denominazione sociale of a company, la denominazione di origine printed on a bottle. It is built straight on denominare, to give a name to, and it carries nothing beyond that. « Denomination » in English went elsewhere twice over. It is first a religious body, so that Methodists and Baptists are two denominations, and it is second a unit of face value, which is why a cashier asks which denominations of note you want. The abstract sense of naming survives only in stiff legal prose, and no clinician reaches for it. The entry therefore has to be rendered by what the clinic actually says — naming difficulty, or word-finding difficulty, or the technical l’anomia, which both languages share. Read la denominazione through « to denominate » rather than through « denomination », and the Italian lands correctly every time.