Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com skribis:
> Same word is used in Italian: "corsivo" (literally, "running") originally
> referred to the special shape of letters. "Italico" or "italiano" are rarely
> used because, from the Italians' point of view, all Latin types are
> "Italian". So "corsivo" is the usual translation of both English "italic"
> and "cursive".
"Italic" is an old English expression and meant at the beginning "Italic
handwriting", i.e. handwriting in the manner of Giovanniantonio Tagliente or
Ludovico degli Arrighi, both Italian authors of famous handwriting manuals.
It was later used for typefaces cut in the same fashion. In printing, normal
characters and italic characters were at the beginning two different
typefaces. I think it was Claude Garamond who brougt them together (1532)
into a family. The Italian "corsivo" is exactly what "italic" is. I have
never seen "italico" used in that meaning, unless somebody made a bad
translation from English.
In the trade "italic" and "oblique" have special meanings. "Italic" means a
special cutting of the typeface, often with different widths and shapes.
"Oblique" means slanted appearance of the normal one. Adobe's fonts, e.g.,
are called Garamond and Garamond-Italic, but Helvetica and
Helvetica-Oblique.
Not every language has two different words for that. In Swedish, as in
German, both are "kursiv". There is a possibility to use "kursiv" for italic
and "kursiverad" for oblique, but it is not in common use.
Franko Luin
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