Caterina Saracco
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9159-0768 
University of Turin, Italy

https://doi.org/10.4467/K7478.47/22.23.17745   

Abstract
This paper is devoted to the analysis the of personal names contained in Die Umschreibungen des Begriffes „Hunger“ im Italienischen: stilistisch-onomasiologische Studie auf Grund von unveröffentlichtem Zensurmaterial. This text was published in 1920 by Leo Spitzer, an Austrian romance philologist who worked, during the First World War, as a censor at the Central Office of the Postal Censorship of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his account, Spitzer reports the different linguistic strategies that Italian prisoners in Austria used in their letters to express the concept of hunger to their relatives in Italy. Among the many linguistic substitutes, a particular place is occupied by the personal names that prisoners used to name hunger. In this article I describe the different types of names that Italian prisoners used as euphemisms for the concepts of hunger and fasting in their letters. I will also show that these anthroponyms are connected to the aforementioned concepts by means of metaphorical or metonymic shifts or thanks to the encyclopedic knowledge of the soldiers. After a brief introduction to Spitzer’s work and to the types of euphemisms (linguistic or extra-linguistic), the analysis focuses on a few types of names: names that recall the physical conditions of prisoners, names related to music, names of saints and names of animals.

Keywords
euphemistic names, war and hunger, metaphor and metonymy, Italian culture