L'Italo-Americano

www.italoamericano.org 10 THURSDAY, JULY 26, 2018 L'Italo-Americano LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE SIMONE SCHIAVINATO " Italian, the language of love," or s o it is s aid around the world - but not in Italy, where the honor usually belongs to French. Many of you probably understand it a little and even more may like to learn it or have been actively doing so. Yet, what do we really know about la Bella Lingua? Of course, we appreciate its musicality and suavity, just as much as its com- plex grammar and syntax may be a pet peeve of ours; we embrace its colorful expres s ions and know about Dante and his Div- ina Commedia, masterpiece of world literature and extraordi- nary compendium of Medieval philosophy, theology and soci- ety. The most perceptive may even recognize a handful of dif- ferent Italian accents, just as some Italians - not too many, alas: our incompatibility with foreign languages is legendary - can tell whether you are from New York City or Atlanta. As any other language, how- ever, Italian is full of quirks, curiosities and interesting anec- dotes about its history and evolu- tion. Excellent trivia to keep your next dinner party guests entertained, here are five curious fact about the language of amore you may not be aware of. 1. The first thing written in Italian was a legal document Or was it? Indeed, linguists have been debating the topic for decades, and not simply because of dating issues. The passage from Latin to Italian didn't hap- pen overnight, but was a rather long, slow process that invested the spoken language much earli- er than the written: while people would, little by little, change the way they spoke, official docu- ments and literature remained faithful to Latin for a much longer time. Truth is, however, that the more time passed, the least your average Joe and Jane of early medieval Italy under- stood Latin, because the lan- guage spoken in the streets had changed profoundly, influenced as it had been by those of post- F all of the Roman Empire invaders like the Franks, the Lombards or the Goths. It had turned into volgare, the lan- guage of people (vulgus in Latin means just that) and by the 9th and 10th century, it began being used to write official documents to allow citizens to fully under- stand them. It comes as no sur- prise to know, then, that a notar- ial deed known as the Placito Capuano (960 AD) is consid- ered the first example still extant of written volgare, the missing link between Latin and Italian. Yet, an earlier inscription found in the Catacombe di Commodil- la in Rome, dating back to the 6th century and asking people not to pray loudly, is viewed as an even earlier example of vol- gare. Others still mention the Veronese Riddle (8th-9th centu- ry), a sort of written limerick that s peaks about, w ell, w riting. Among all contenders, the Plac- ito Capuano is usually counted as the most credible because it is the only one with a significant portion of the text in a language w hich is , clearly, no longer Latin. 2. Italian hasn't always been the most spoken language in Italy Indeed, when Italy was uni- fied in 1861, a vast majority of people didn't speak Italian at all. Even the first king of Italy, Vit- torio Emanuele II, was more comfortable with French or his ow n dialect, P iedmontes e. Dialects were, in fact, more com- monly spoken than Italian pretty much everywhere in the peninsu- la, with Italian being the lan- guage used by people who got an education. And there weren't many! At the time of Unifica- tion, only 2.5% of population could read and write. 3. Neoitaliano does exist! The idea that Italian was slowly but steadily turning into a new, different language came to Pier Paolo Pasolini as far back as 1964. Today, this new linguistic form, the neoitaliano, a syntacti- cally simpler version of standard Italian, is very much recognized by experts: in it foreign words, mostly English, have become common and often substitute Italian terms. Neologisms, often based on technological words, have become more and more common and verbal tenses tend to be simpler, the habit of using the imperfect instead of the sub- junctive being an example of it. However, linguists do not seem worried about the popularity of neoitaliano, but rather by the lack of knowledge of proper grammar and syntax affecting a large chunk of the Italian popula- tion, including university stu- dents: Francesco Bruni, a con- temporary linguist, calls this extremely poor variety of written and spoken Italian Italiano sel- vaggio. 4. Italy has dialects but also "territorial languages" Dialects are essential part of Italy's linguistic and cultural pat- rimony and wealth. Each region, nay, each village, has a different idiom often competing, especial- ly among the older generations, w ith the s tandard language. There are so many that the Enci- clopedia Treccani, traditionally known as the country's general knowledge's guardian, says it is almos t impos s ible to count them. Some dialects, in fact, are s poken commonly by s uch a high amount of people they are no longer considered as such, but rather as lingue territoriali, or territorial languages. The most spoken of them is Neapolitan, with almost 6 million speakers; in second place Sicilian, with 4.7 million and then Veneto (3.8 million), Lombard (3.6 million) and Piedmontese (1.6 million). 5. Real Curiosities about Italian words Let's conclude w ith s ome cool trivia about Italian vocabu- lary. Well, we should start with the alphabet, w hich in Italy counts only 21 letters, because j, k, w, x, and y are not officially in it, even if they are today includ- ed because of the high number of foreign words used on an every- day basis by most Italians. The longest word in Italian is precip- itevolis s im evolm ente, w hich means very quickly, with 26 let- ters. However, there are some medical terms and numbers that manage to top that: 454.544th (in Italian quattrocentocinquan- taquattromilacinquecentoquar- antaquattresimo) beats them all, with its 64 letters. Contrarily to what happens in English, where they are present but not pronounced, double con- sonants are very common in Ital- ian: the strangest set of double consonants in it? Certainly dou- ble q, as sported by the one and only soqquadro, that translates with mess or disarray. Ask any Italian friend about it, and they will very likely bring you along a trip into their elementary school years, when the word was among the most feared when la maestra faceva il dettato. Other spelling dark monsters? Acqua (water), camicie (shirts), scienza (sci- ence) and zuzzurellone (a man child). The Italian language has been evolving, but changes are not always good, according to some linguists: they may make our language poorer Five quirks and curiosities about the Italian language

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