Econometrics

The thirty-first entry is l’autocorrelazione, and the piece on the front of it is two prefixes wearing one spelling. The first is the Greek autós, self, which Italian uses exactly as English does: l’autostima is self-esteem, l’autogol is an own goal, l’autodidatta is somebody self-taught, and the word in this list names a series correlated with itself. The second is not Greek at all. It is the front half of l’automobile, cut off and set to work as a prefix, and it has built a whole shelf of everyday nouns: l’autostrada is the motorway, l’autoscuola the driving school, l’autolavaggio the car wash, l’autonoleggio the hire firm, l’autofficina the garage. Nothing in the spelling separates them, and Italian welds both to the word behind without a hyphen, so the reader decides from the sense alone. The test that works is short: if the thing could plausibly do it to itself, the prefix is Greek; otherwise there is a car inside the word.