Giochi di parole onomastici: gli antroponimi stranieri fittizi del tipo Ciolanka Sbilenka

Abstract

This paper focuses on a particular type of onomastic wordplays, that could be labelled “fake foreign anthroponyms”, in which a fake foreign proper name is created whose pronunciation corresponds to an Italian utterance (e.g., the name of the Russian dancer Ciolanka Sbilenka, whose pronunciation corresponds to the Italian sentence “c’ho l’anca sbilenca” (that is ‘my hip is uneven’). Based on a collection of 438 Italian examples, a linguistic analysis is proposed to account of the strategies used in such wordplays to imitate or parody the foreign languages.