Satellite navigation in Italian

The twenty-second entry is il controllo di integrità, and the small word in the middle is the one an English reader keeps forgetting to supply. English builds a technical term by stacking nouns and letting the last one rule: « integrity monitoring », « signal acquisition », « tracking loop », « sensor fusion ». Nothing marks the relation between the parts, and the reader works it out from what the words mean. Italian cannot do that. It puts the head first and ties on whatever qualifies it with a preposition, nearly always di: il controllo di integrità, l’acquisizione del segnale, la fase della portante, l’anello di inseguimento, la fusione dei sensori. Three things follow. The order is reversed, so a stack of three has to be read from the back: « satellite signal authentication » comes out as l’autenticazione del segnale del satellite. The preposition often swallows an article and fuses with it, which is where del, della and dei come from. And the relation, left unsaid in English, now has to be chosen: il tempo al primo fix takes a and not di, because the time is counted up to a moment rather than owned by it.