FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favourite neologism is the Mandarin Chinese colour term 安可拉红 ānkělā hóng (‘Ancora red’). It is a hybrid compound: a phonetic loan of the Italian word ancora ‘again, still’, followed by the native colour term 红 hóng ‘red’. It appeared in fashion. Rosso Ancora was the signature colour of Gucci’s Ancora collection, presented at Milan Fashion Week in September 2023, and Gucci’s marketing spread the term widely in China in 2024–2025. It denotes a deep, low-saturation oxblood red, between wine red and dark cherry, which Chinese fashion media contrast with the traditional bright 中国红 ‘China red’. I find it particularly interesting because of the transcription. 安可 ānkě already exists in Chinese as the loanword for encore, the call for an artist to perform again. The rendering of ancora therefore echoes a word with almost the same meaning, so the transcription is both phonetic and, by coincidence or design, semantically apt. It is also a nice example of an Italian word entering the Chinese colour lexicon.
Source: 《三联生活周刊》 (Sanlian Lifeweek), “2025年的顶流穿搭，是’反潮流’系列？”, https://www.lifeweek.com.cn/h5/article/detail.do?artId=240577

I am Associate Professor of Chinese Language, Linguistics and Translation at the University of Bergamo (Italy). My research focuses on the historical semantics of Chinese, in particular colour naming and categorisation: how colour terms emerge, shift in meaning and are reorganised over time, including how new and borrowed terms are integrated into the lexicon. I also work on translation between Chinese, Russian and Italian, most recently on the cross-linguistic rendering of creative commercial names and wordplay, and on how AI translation engines handle such lexical innovations. Within ENEOLI, I am particularly interested in neology in Chinese, a language still underrepresented in European research on lexical innovation. I teach Chinese language, linguistics and translation at BA and MA level. I am Vice-President of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS) and a Board member of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL), and I will host the 2027 EACL Summer School in Chinese Linguistics in Bergamo.