artisan
artisan – modificatore nominale
artisanal – aggettivo
True artisan cheeses should be made on a small scale, often using milk from a single herd of animals on the cheese-maker’s own farm.
This newly opened artisan bakery in Hall Green is selling bread made with flour milled at the restored Sarehole Mill.
We took a closer look at some of our favorite artisanal chocolate brands that have been making waves in the food scene over the past few years.
The bread is made from scratch by our talented artisan bakers.
La rapidità con cui avvengono mutamenti nel linguaggio è davvero sorprendente. Nelle ricerche per la stesura di questo post ho consultato due fonti ‘vecchie’: il British National Corpus, del 1992, e un dizionario d’inglese piuttosto completo, dei primi anni 2000. Ebbene, nessuno dei due riportava il significato di artisan/artisanal nel campo dell’alimentazione; a quel tempo mai si sarebbe associato un artisan a un prodotto da mangiare o da bere, e artisanal era un aggettivo piuttosto infrequente. Provate ora a cercare artisan su Google: due su quattro delle prime occorrenze hanno a che fare con prodotti alimentari, e artisanal dà ben 28 milioni di risultati, molti dei quali si riferiscono a formaggi, pane, cioccolato ecc.
Tale mutamento rispecchia ciò che è avvenuto nel Regno Unito così come in altri Paesi, dove al volgere del terzo millennio le panetterie di quartiere sono scomparse una per una, stritolate non ultimo dalla concorrenza dei supermercati e dove ora però siamo disposti a pagare un occhio per il pane prodotto in piccole quantità dall’umile fornaio perché è molto più buono di quello del supermercato. OK, costa di più, ma vuoi mettere? E allora lunga vita agli artisan bakers, cheesemakers e chocolatiers.
Origini del termine
Artisan e artisanal vengono da ‘artigiano’ attraverso il francese artisan. Non c’è grande differenza tra l’uso del modificatore nominale e quello dell’aggettivo, tranne forse una certa preferenza dell’inglese americano per artisanal.
Traduzione di Loredana Riu
artisan – noun modifier
artisanal – adjective
True artisan cheeses should be made on a small scale, often using milk from a single herd of animals on the cheese-maker’s own farm.
This newly opened artisan bakery in Hall Green is selling bread made with flour milled at the restored Sarehole Mill.
We took a closer look at some of our favorite artisanal chocolate brands that have been making waves in the food scene over the past few years.
The bread is made from scratch by our talented artisan bakers.
The pace of language change is truly astonishing. When researching this post I looked at two ‘old’ sources: the British National Corpus, from 1992, and a large English dictionary produced in the early 2000s. Neither includes the meanings of artisan/al relating to food; back in the early part of this century an artisan was simply a craftsman (or craftswoman) and artisanal was the (very infrequent) related adjective. Now if you enter artisan into Google, two of the top four suggestions relate to food, while artisanal returns a massive 28 million hits, many of them referring to cheese, bread, chocolate and so on.
This reflects a social change that has taken place in the UK as elsewhere. Having sadly watched as our local bakeries closed down one by one in the late 90s and early 2000s, we are now the happy customers of a local baker who has realised that there is a market for bread made from flour, yeast, salt and water and baked daily in small quantities. People come from miles around to stock up on his delicious offerings which cost more than supermarket bread but taste so much better. Long live the artisan bakers, cheesemakers and, why not, chocolatiers.
Origins
Artisan and its related adjective artisanal derive, of course, from the Italian artigiano, via the French artisan. There seems to be little difference in usage between the noun modifier and the adjective, apart from a preference for artisanal in American English.
