New Publication: The History and Development of “Influenza” in English
During her time at PANSOC, postdoc Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar published an article in the Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference providing an explanation of the use of the term “influenza” in English, in contrast to the more common “grippe” of other Indo-European languages.
While most Indo-European languages refer to the disease using some variant of “grippe”, Italian, English, Uralic, and Nordic languages have preferred “influenza” (which has an Italian origin). The authors argue that “influenza” in contrast to “grippe”, sounds sufficiently different from other English words to avoid ambiguity in understanding. They test the linguistic space available for possible terms that could be used to describe influenza and posit that the term selected provided less ambiguity than the terms used in other Indo-European languages.