Resumen de Ital. "arcobaleno"
The most recent Italian etymological dictionaries agree in associating the words arcobaleno ‘rainbow’ (first found in Italian by the end of the fifteenth century) and balena ‘whale’. This approach is based on conceptual reasoning: the fantastic and majestic impression generated when they appear, and the animal’s magical and monstrous attributes. The Author proposes implicating a point of actual contact between the two realities: the fact that the characteristic vertical spray blown by the whale allows the refraction of sunlight to generate a rainbow for a few seconds. According to the Author Italian sailors and/or fishermen of the late Middle Ages may have spread word of how whales generated with the air they expelled a coloured bow in the air: that must have easily led to attributing any arc appearing in the sky to the spray blown by whales at sea. Therefore arcobaleno = arco di/della balena (or di/del baleno ‘whale’) with oblique case without a preposition, a syntactic use of the ancient Italian language. Arcobaleno, then, as a word coming from a real sensory experience, and not from a vague association of ideas.
