Il “dialetto come linguaggio segreto” nelle Perifrasi del concetto di fame di Leo Spitzer. Rassegna e prime considerazioni

While working for the Austrian military censorship during the First World War, Leo Spitzer collected and transcribed a lot of circumlocutions used by the Italian-speaking prisoners to complain about hunger in their letters to families and friends. These periphrasis became later the subject of a scientific essay published in Germany in 1920 but still unpublished in Italy. As translator of this book, I present and discuss in my paper a choice of circumlocutions in which the prisoners, who were mostly semiliterate, use their own dialect as a secret code, to elude censorship.