Environment and climate in Italian

The nineteenth entry is il rimboschimento, and taken apart it holds a word an English reader already owns. At the centre sits il bosco, the wood, and bosco is not Latin: it reached the Romance languages from Germanic busk, which is the same word as « bush ». Italian then builds outwards in the ordinary way — imboschire is to put a wood on a piece of ground, rimboschire is to put one back, disboscare further down this list is to take it away — so the noun here is, letter by letter, a re-bushing. English cannot follow that road, because « bush » stayed small: a shrub, a hedge, the scrub of a dry country. For the large idea the language went to its borrowed word instead, « forest », and every derivative is built on that one — « afforestation », « deforestation », « reforestation », each of them stiff and administrative. So the two languages name one operation from opposite registers. Italian uses the plainest noun it has, the one in una passeggiata nel bosco; English uses a term nobody says at a kitchen table.