Philosophy in Italian

The twenty-sixth entry is la proprietà emergente, and the noun in the middle does a job that « property » in English never took on. Both words go back to the Latin proprietas, what belongs to a thing as its own, and both still cover the two obvious senses: the attribute of a substance, as in la liquidità è una proprietà delle molecole, and the house or the land somebody owns, la proprietà privata. Italian then added a third sense that stayed at home. La proprietà di linguaggio is the fitness of the words a person chooses, and parlare con proprietà means to speak accurately and in the register the occasion asks for — a compliment paid to a witness, a pupil, a translator. Nothing in English follows the same path: we say « correctness », « precision » or « propriety », and the last of those has drifted so far towards good manners that it turns the sentence into a remark about behaviour rather than about words. So read proprietà twice. Once for what a thing has, and once for how well somebody says it.