A proposito di olio e burro

The term maslo presents an evident contiguity between various meanings in which two civilizations meet and clash: butter and oil, North and South Europe are two worlds silently facing each other for ages. The semantic plane, on which we partially tried to reconstruct the lexeme profile, reveals how the association of ideas leads to polysemic proliferation. Starting from the connections of word formation in related languages, we tried to account for the diachronic development of the semantic structure of maslo, considering some systemic relations, such as synonymy and lexical combinability. In attempt to recompose a dynamic structure of what is associated with the functionality of the word, the present description, although fragmentary, intends to embrace not only lexical information, but an encyclopedic knowledge, reporting observations and points of view on both linguistic and semantic level.