Streaming and subscriptions in Italian

The eighth entry is le riproduzioni contemporanee, and an English eye reads it as something like « contemporary playbacks », which is the wrong picture altogether. It counts the streams a household may run at the same moment, and the work is done by contemporanee. Both languages inherited the two senses that con- and tempus between them allow, and each has promoted a different one. Italian puts the temporal overlap first: contemporaneamente is the everyday adverb for simultaneously, in contemporanea is said of two programmes going out at once, and due riunioni contemporanee are two meetings that clash. The other sense is alive too — l’arte contemporanea is exactly what it looks like — but it needs a noun like art or history to bring it out. English went the opposite way. Before a noun, « contemporary » now means modern almost by reflex, and the older job was handed to « contemporaneous », which nobody says aloud. So the rule for reading is short: meet contemporaneo, try « at the same time » first, and reach for « modern » only when the first will not fit the sentence.