Italian grammar and etiquette

[PaulMB]

In my contribution upthread I specifically stated that the source of my info was my NORTHERN Italian partner. I have noted, in her family, a definite anti South bias especially manifested in an irritation caused by Southern accents. They were keen that American born relatives coming to Italy to improve their language skills should do so in the North. Otherwise they seem very nice.

I understand what you mean by "Otherwise," and I agree that the anti-south bias among many northern Italians borders on racism. But on the other hand it is clear that modern, efficient, transparent Italy is in the north, while there are strong cultural roots of corruption, fatalism, mafia and inefficiency in much of the south. This is history and contemporary reality, unfortunately. Also, if someone comes to Italy to study Italian, everyone would agree that they should do it in regions in which better Italian is spoken. From Tuscany northwards. Just as you would not send someone to learn Hochdeutsch to Bavaria or Vienna or someone to learn English to Northumberland or Cornwall. It may be linguistic snobbery, but there it is.

 

[KrisW]

Hey now-- I learned my German in Bavaria! In fairness, I was advised to model my accent on what I heard on the news, though, rather than that of the people I worked with... I must have overshot a bit: on a later trip to Switzerland, people thought I was Dutch.

And, while I’m at it, a friend of mine learned to speak English in Glasgow - accent included. I first met her and her now husband (Glasgow born and bred) at the same time, but she’d learned her English before she met him from someone with a much different, and stronger, Glasgow accent; his is a soft burr that he called “the other Glasgow accent; the one you never hear on television”. As a result, when they moved to Ireland first, people would always say to her “Oh, no need to ask where you’re from!”, then ask where he was from. To which, he would reply, with mock indignation: “I am from Glasgow... she, on the other hand, is from Munich”. (Irish people always ask where you’re from on meeting you first, regardless of how you might look or sound - it’s considered impolite to not try to get to know someone when you meet them).

I’d argue that a neutral Scottish or Welsh accent is better to adopt than the traditional high-status English one, which is not only a bizarre twisting of the sounds of the language, but also has a little too much cultural baggage attached to it: that baggage might sway people in England (exhibit A: Boris Johnson), but outside of England, it suggests someone who is much more a Bertie Wooster than a Winston Churchill.

Incidentally, the Romans I’ve spoken to will admit that they speak horrible Italian... you get the first half of every word, then they stop and move on to the next one. I had a Roman colleague at a previous job and when I said I was learning Italian he just said: “Don’t ever listen to me when I speak it, and you’ll be fine”. Again, like the other very young country, Germany, the language of the capital city does not set the standard for the nation the way it does in most other countries (a Berliner’s German is not as bad as a Roman’s Italian, but it’s not exactly High German).

 

[psi310398]

In my contribution upthread I specifically stated that the source of my info was my NORTHERN Italian partner. I have noted, in her family, a definite anti South bias especially manifested in an irritation caused by Southern accents. They were keen that American born relatives coming to Italy to improve their language skills should do so in the North. Otherwise they seem very nice.

While there clearly is an entrenched anti-southern bias (Sicilians are, for example, often referred to as Africans around my neighbourhood), there is a fairly ingrained suspicion of anybody who isn’t friend or family or vouched for by the former two. And the further you go the stronger the suspicion but my Piedmontese neighbours also look quite askance at the, so far as I know, wholly blameless Lombardians who live a mile or so across the lake. Campanilism is a real thing in Italy.

And there is a pervasive dislike of ‘Rome’ ie the government, civil service and nationalised industries, who are pretty universally seen as dishonest leeches.

 

[KrisW]

Italy is a very new country, but unlike Germany which was formed from a group of independent neighbouring states that had mostly got on with their own business over the years, Italy was created out of seven small states and imperial posessions that had spent a lot of their previous history fighting each other. Modern Piedmont was one part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, a French ally, while the kingdom of Lombardia-Veneto was a client of the Austrian empire. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (what most Italians call “the South”) was run by the Spanish. In the middle, the Papal States (modern Lazio, Marche and Romagna) fought all of these, with the three duchies (Parma, Modena and the Grand-duchy of Tuscany) siding with whoever would best guarantee their future.

The “official” date of Unification is celebrated as 1861, but at that time, the Papal States were still not part of Italy, and it was a couple of decades before an “Italy” as we would know it took shape (actually, the final borders of Italy were only settled in 1963, when the city of Trieste was fully brought into the country). Some of the dislike of Rome is because it was seen as a latecomer to the Italian project, but one which ended up as the capital of the new nation.

That 150 years or so isn’t a long time to undo centuries of distrust between neighbours, and the petty regionalism still persists in politics. Silvio Berlusconi, as ever, was notorious in favouring his home city of Milan, and Lombardy in general, over the other northern regions - to the point of vetoing industrial aid to the car industry during the financial crisis (making Italy the only industrialised nation to not aid its car industry) seemingly because it would have meant supporting industry in Turin, the home of his arch-rivals, the Agnelli family (owners of Juventus; Berlusconi was an owner in A.C. Milan). For a measure of the man, when former head of FIAT, Giovanni Agnelli died, Berlusconi chose to be driven to the funeral of Italy’s most successful car-maker in an Audi.

 

[awkwardbydesign]

I guessed what campanilism meant, but had to look it up to be sure.

 

[MikeMA]

I have to say I'm hugely impressed by the knowledge of languages, grammar and history demonstrated by pfm members here: a truly polyglot bunch, even down to regional accents.

I can get by in German - I first learnt the basics at school in the UK, then lived and worked in West Berlin for several years back in the 1980s - but now, when I try speaking German with Germans they usually smile and immediately switch to English, and I've been asked on more than one occasion why I bother when most Germans speak good English! While this is certainly true, I'm not certain it's the real reason they revert to English when confronted with my German

 

[molee]

Also, if someone comes to Italy to study Italian, everyone would agree that they should do it in regions in which better Italian is spoken. From Tuscany northwards. Just as you would not send someone to learn Hochdeutsch to Bavaria or Vienna or someone to learn English to Northumberland or Cornwall. It may be linguistic snobbery, but there it is.

At school, our Spanish teacher was from Liverpool. We were convinced we would end up speaking Spanish with a Scouse accent and would do our oral tests with an exaggerated Scouse accent. We thought we were hilarious......

 

[Mike Reed]

And the spelling is an absolute nightmare. Once again English spelling is so easy to master it seems.

Bough, tough, through, cough...ad nauseam. You've gotta be joking, Chartz. Then there are the umpteen homophones. English is a bastard language, so I'm always surprised that foreigners find it easy. Maybe many find a bit of their own tucked away in the mishmash.

 

[stevec67]

At school, our Spanish teacher was from Liverpool. We were convinced we would end up speaking Spanish with a Scouse accent and would do our oral tests with an exaggerated Scouse accent. We thought we were hilarious......

For comic effect I sometimes speak French to my French pals with a strong Yorkshire accent. Michael Palin in Ripping Yarns meets Allo Allo. They howl, for as long as I can keep it up.

 

[KrisW]

@Mike Reed - Agreed. English spelling is horrendous. Of the languages I’ve ever tried to learn, or are spoken by my friends, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Irish, Finnish, Czech all have regular spelling. I have a suspicion that Danish spelling is also regular, but Danish pronunciation is so outlandish that It’s hard to tell (old joke: The best way to learn Danish is to become fluent in Swedish, then stick a potato down your throat - and it was a Dane told me that!).

French suffers from silent letters and sometimes silent words, but the spelling is regular enough that you can usually get a good stab at being right, but you need to use an accent - you can’t just speak French like a rosbif and expect to be understood (you end up sounding kind of like how Antoine de Caunes spoke English on Eurotrash). I have an odd problem with French, because apparently I can do a really natural French accent (picked up by imitating a French friend), but the thing is, I really can’t speak French very well at all; unfortunately having an intelligible accent makes me the one that locals try to explain things to whenever a group of us are in France, and worse, saying “desolé, mais je ne parle pas...” only sounds like I’m taking the piss...

I have to say I'm hugely impressed by the knowledge of languages, grammar and history demonstrated by pfm members here: a truly polyglot bunch, even down to regional accents.

I can get by in German - I first learnt the basics at school in the UK, then lived and worked in West Berlin for several years back in the 1980s - but now, when I try speaking German with Germans they usually smile and immediately switch to English, and I've been asked on more than one occasion why I bother when most Germans speak good English! While this is certainly true, I'm not certain it's the real reason they revert to English when confronted with my German

Germans just love to practice their English, and in the Northern part of the country, most people can speak English pretty well - it’s taught in school, and greater exposure to Dutch, English and Scandinavian languages helps a lot with making it stick. If you go further south, and out from the cities, people are less proficient in English, not having much reason to use it every day, and you’ll get more respect for your German.

I had the opposite experience in the Czech Republic. Very few people speak English where I was, but it was only on my most recent visit (and my fifth in total!) that I thought of trying to use German: hey presto - Instant communication! Everyone learns German, Polish or English in school, but in a country that’s mostly sandwiched between Germany and Austria, German is easy to hear, and easy to practice, so the younger generation in particular are mostly fluent in it. Of the other neighbouring languages, Slovakian is about as close as two languages can be while being separate (think English and Scots), and anyone over 40 knows both because all media used to be bilingual across all of Czechoslovakia (to the point where the TV newsreaders would alternate between Czech and Slovak for each news report); and Polish is also reasonably close to Czech despite the spelling differences, so a lot of Northern Czechs can understand or speak it without much effort (sort of like Spanish and Italian). The older generation would have been taught Russian in school, but my Czech sister-in-law falls between those two camps: she was in secondary school at the fall of Communism, and said the Russian teacher just came in one Monday and basically told them all “Forget all this Russian nonsense: from now on, we will learn German!”

 

[kensalriser]

Italy is a very new country, but unlike Germany which was formed from a group of independent neighbouring states that had mostly got on with their own business over the years, Italy was created out of seven small states and imperial posessions that had spent a lot of their previous history fighting each other. Modern Piedmont was one part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, a French ally, while the kingdom of Lombardia-Veneto was a client of the Austrian empire. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (what most Italians call “the South”) was run by the Spanish. In the middle, the Papal States (modern Lazio, Marche and Romagna) fought all of these, with the three duchies (Parma, Modena and the Grand-duchy of Tuscany) siding with whoever would best guarantee their future.

The “official” date of Unification is celebrated as 1861, but at that time, the Papal States were still not part of Italy, and it was a couple of decades before an “Italy” as we would know it took shape (actually, the final borders of Italy were only settled in 1963, when the city of Trieste was fully brought into the country). Some of the dislike of Rome is because it was seen as a latecomer to the Italian project, but one which ended up as the capital of the new nation.

That 150 years or so isn’t a long time to undo centuries of distrust between neighbours, and the petty regionalism still persists in politics. Silvio Berlusconi, as ever, was notorious in favouring his home city of Milan, and Lombardy in general, over the other northern regions - to the point of vetoing industrial aid to the car industry during the financial crisis (making Italy the only industrialised nation to not aid its car industry) seemingly because it would have meant supporting industry in Turin, the home of his arch-rivals, the Agnelli family (owners of Juventus; Berlusconi was an owner in A.C. Milan). For a measure of the man, when former head of FIAT, Giovanni Agnelli died, Berlusconi chose to be driven to the funeral of Italy’s most successful car-maker in an Audi.

I love Italy and have visited it more than any other country. But when I started doing business with Italians I quickly learned they all despise each other.

 

[awkwardbydesign]

For comic effect I sometimes speak French to my French pals with a strong Yorkshire accent. Michael Palin in Ripping Yarns meets Allo Allo. They howl, for as long as I can keep it up.

Out riding with some Italian friends in Switzerland, they had a go with my English to Italian phrase book. Phonetic Italian for English speakers. We all fell about, as they tried to pronounce the words.

 

[Mike Reed]

Germans just love to practice

There's another anomaly; the Americans (and, I suspect, the Aussies ) simply have 'practise' whereas we differentiate between noun and verb (c and s respectively)

 

[mandryka]

For comic effect I sometimes speak French to my French pals with a strong Yorkshire accent. Michael Palin in Ripping Yarns meets Allo Allo. They howl, for as long as I can keep it up.

The French vowel /o/ is really hard for me to pronounce, and I sometimes think I make myself better understood and less risible if I say it in a Northern English way. I go to a lot of trouble to avoid saying things like en haut.

 

[Mike Reed]

After a fatality, the police always pronounce someone 'dead' and I often wonder how many ways there are to pronounce this. (sorry; silly moment !)

I take my hat off to the linguists here; even the aspiring ones and of course it's well understood that this increases cognitive ability, or at least preserves in in older age.

Apart from schoolboy French in the fifties, I only know a smattering of European words. However, pronunciation of the Latin languages and German comes easily. Maybe my liaison with so many students or vindication of my comment on the difficulties of English spellings/pron.

 

[stevec67]

The French vowel /o/ is really hard for me to pronounce, and I sometimes think I make myself better understood and less risible if I say it in a Northern English way. I go to a lot of trouble to avoid saying things like en haut.

If you think of the O s in "I don't rightly know" as spoken by Nora Batty or Wallace and Gromit you are very , very close to "en haut" . My bête noire is the difference in pronunciation between "la rue" (the street) and "la roue" ( the wheel). Try as I might I can't hear the difference between the 2 sounds, much less reproduce them.

 

[martin clark]

For comic effect I sometimes speak French to my French pals with a strong Yorkshire accent. Michael Palin in Ripping Yarns meets Allo Allo. They howl, for as long as I can keep it up.

Thomas K of this parish - being German first but perfectly, idiomatically bilingual from childhood - once demonstrated to me, the most hilarious implementation of a German, doing an impression of an Englishman speaking German. I (in silent response, via stonyface mime and the occasional quiet / 'was..?') was forced into playing the German. Small cafe we were in descended into bewildered silence, trying not to watch.

We had to feign great mutual insult, to get outside & corpse. A masterclass, tk...

 

[stevec67]

Thomas K of this parish - being German first but perfectly, idiomatically bilingual from childhood - once demonstrated to me, the most hilarious implementation of a German, doing an impression of an Englishman speaking German. I (in silent response, via stonyface mime and the occasional quiet / 'was..?') was forced into playing the German. Small cafe we were in descended into bewildered silence, trying not to watch.

We had to feign great mutual insult, to get outside & corpse. A masterclass, tk...

Shades of "the man with the most sarcastic voice in the world" , was it The Mary Whitehouse Experience?

 

[PsB]

After a fatality, the police always pronounce someone 'dead' and I often wonder how many ways there are to pronounce this. (sorry; silly moment !)

In the Deep South, it's "deyud".

 

[stevec67]

Thomas K of this parish - being German first but perfectly, idiomatically bilingual from childhood - once demonstrated to me, the most hilarious implementation of a German, doing an impression of an Englishman speaking German. I (in silent response, via stonyface mime and the occasional quiet / 'was..?') was forced into playing the German. Small cafe we were in descended into bewildered silence, trying not to watch.

We had to feign great mutual insult, to get outside & corpse. A masterclass, tk...

a friend of mine in his late teens had learnt a few words of Japanese via karate classes. He and a friend used to stroll around town until they found someone looking in a shop window. They would then stand behind him and speak "Japanese" to each other , quietly at first and then louder until the chap looked round to find 2 young white Europeans having this alien conversation.