Democracia: historia de una palabra. La Linguística en Italia y la historia semántica de las palabras

The history of the term democracy is a "Greek-Latin-European" story that has its roots in Greece, in classical and medieval Latin and that has its apex in the cosmopolitan culture of the Enlightenment. In this contribution the history of the word is retraced from classical antiquity to the European lexicon and, in particular, to Italian, as an exemplary model of historical semantic analysis that, in Italian linguistics, had an exceptional exponent in Tullio De Mauro (1932-2017). In this lexicon, mirror of the life of a population, there remain traces of the link between the word and the world that generated it that are masterfully brought to light in De Mauro's work (1958).