Romance Language Nouns Ending in “-ista”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Zach Fix from Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan.

Zach Fix? Like F-I-X?

F-I-X. That’s my last name.

That is an awesome name, dude!

That is great.

Thank you.

You should be like a comic book character.

I know, right?

With like spiky purple hair and a laser gun.

Zach, how can we help you?

I have a friend, and he moved out to Portland.

And he got a job working at a coffee shop, and his official title was barista.

And he is a man.

So I was kind of confused about that because I thought that a lot of the –

Barista sounds like a borrowed word from some romantic language.

And normally those borrowed words that we have in English,

We also take the gender that goes along with it, which is dependent on whoever is doing the occupation, whether it be a man or a woman, like actor, actress, waiter, waitress.

My question is, why isn’t he a barista?

Yeah, well, you’re right that barista does go back to, I mean, it’s an Italian word.

Italian, yeah.

Barista, somebody who works at a bar.

From the culture that perfected the quick delivery of coffee.

The thing is that there are a lot of words in Italian, Zach, and Spanish, for that matter, that end in ISTA that take either gender.

Oh.

Yeah.

So, for example, if you go to Italy, you will be referred to as a turista.

Okay.

Even though you’re a man.

Yeah.

Even though you’re a man.

You know, it’s il turista or la turista.

And there’s the rub.

So in the Romance languages, we have the articles that go with the nouns that take the same gender, right?

So la turista means a female tourist.

However, if we borrow la barista into English, we don’t borrow the la.

We only borrow the barista part.

And also because we don’t have gender in that way in English, it’s stripped away.

The article’s gone, the gender is gone, and we simply borrow the noun without a gender attached.

Yeah, and there are a lot of these words in those languages that refer to somebody who does something professionally, usually, or adheres to a particular belief.

Like the Nicaraguan followers of Sandino were called Sandinistas, right?

Even the male ones.

Yeah, or we talk about fashionistas, which is a fanciful English term.

Nice. Good one.

Yeah.

But I do like, I’ve got to ask you a question, Zach.

Barista kind of elevates the position.

You’re something other than a coffee monkey, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It definitely does sound a little bit more official, doesn’t it?

Maybe coffee jerk instead of, you know, it’s a parallel with soda jerk.

Coffee artist.

Coffee artist.

Yeah, if they do the weird foam, like the giraffe over the edge of the cup,

You’ve ever seen this one?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, there’s some great pictures on the web.

Well, Zach Fix, there’s your answer.

What do you think?

Thank you very much.

All right, take care now.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, it’s weird.

There’s this whole class of nouns like that, and it goes back to Latin and Greek.

That’s why they’re there.

There is a really good explanation of what we’re talking about with the genders and the A ending and so forth at the site tutorino.ca, T-U-T-O-R-I-N-O.

This is a site for learning Italian.

Just go to the site and search for the word gender, and you’ll probably come up with the entry that fully explains how this works in Italian.

Cool.

877-929-9673.