On a Peculiar Morpho-Syntactic Pattern in the Adaptation of Levantine Place-Names into Early Modern Italian

With a few exceptions, Italian endonyms of towns and cities are typically not preceded by a definite article. It is then noteworthy that the Italian names of important Levantine harbours to be found in Mediaeval and Early Modern travelogues are often preceded by the article (Il Cairo < al-Qāhira, La Canea < Chaniá in the island of Crete, Lepanto < *L’Epanto < vernacular Greek (N)épaktos for Classic Greek Náfpaktos: see Migliorini 1927). What is more striking is that a numbers of city names such as Le Smirne = Smyrna and Le Gomenizze = Igoumenitsa have been integrated into Early Modern Italian as plurals, as shown by the articles that go along with them. The same adaptation pattern can be found in the names of some Greek and North-African islands, as for instance le Marlere = Ereíkoussa, le Gerbe = Jerba and li Gozi = Gozo. In this paper we aim to investigate the genesis of this unusual toponymic paradigm.