THE WORD "RAID" IN ITALIAN.
[To TEE EDITOR or THE "SPECTATOR.`]
SIB,—Your correspondent A. Bnlwer seems to be highly amused because the Italians, borrowing the English word " ride," in a special sense, choose to spell it phonetically in accordance with their own sound system.
But this surely is neither absurd nor unusual. In French, for example, we have " rosbif," " raout," " bouledogue," and other words which illustrate the same principle ; and in English there is " breeze," from the French " brise" (or Spanish " brim") ; " junket," from the Italian " giuncata " ; " coracle," from the Welsh " cwrwg1"; " reel," from the Gaelic " righil " ; in all which, and in many other words, an attempt has been made to represent the foreign sound by a more or less phonetic English spelling.
The word "raid" is not quite new, however, in Italian. I find it several times in an Italian newspaper of more than four years ago which I happen to have at hand, e.g., " il raid Pekino-Parigi." The identity in form with another English word need give Italians no anxiety. If they have occasion to borrow the other word—to denote, for example, their present enterprise in Tripoli—they will have no difficulty in spelling this also phonetically, and so preserving a due distinction.—I
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