Linguistic Slip-Up Nearly Causes Culinary Confusion

Back in Milan for a few days over the weekend in an attempt to get my Italy fix for the summer, a friend and I went out for drinks at Il Coccio, a bar with a big outside terrace and a highly dangerous staircase if you need to go to the toilet after a couple of drinks on the corner of the Naviglio Grande and the Naviglio Pavese. The waiter came to take our orders and I told him the name of the cocktail I wanted.

"But we don't serve pizza here," he said.

Because, ladies and gentlemen, the cocktail is a margarita, the pizza is a margherita, and in Italian you can actually hear the difference.

My New Favourite Expression:

'ha alzato troppo il gomito"

Literally, "he's raised his elbow too often".

Figuratively, I'm sure you can guess!

Unravelling the Confusion

One night in Italy as we sat down for dinner, we had a little bit of trouble remembering whose napkin was whose. At the inside dinner table, we all had a different colour of napkin rings, but the night before we had eaten outside using different napkins in different rings and had not necessarily all taken the same colour. As we tried to sort out the situation, my friend and hostess remarked, “Gli italiani amano fare confusione” (“Italians love to create confusion”). As anyone who has lived in Italy will testify, this is absolutely true. Confusion is an excuse for lots of talking and hand gestures, and Italians love those.

Around the same time, I discovered that the Italian word for “to develop”, sviluppare, also means "to untie" or "to extricate." In other words, the complete opposite of fare confusione!

Put these two facts together and you can see how progress in Italy rarely comes quickly. To compensate, however, there are at least plenty of opportunities for social interaction along the way!

Parli Italiolo?

After my mum left last week, my friend R. and her boyfriend P. came to stay. R. is Scottish, but she lives in Seville, and P. is Spanish. As I know about twenty words in Spanish, most of which make up bizarre curses which R. taught me when we were flatmates at uni, and P. only spoke a little bit of English, we spent the next three days testing the theory that Spanish and Italian are mutually comprehensible languages (that is, that Italian speakers can understand Spanish and vice versa). I came to the conclusion that this theory is exaggerated. While the two languages, like Italian and French, are very similar grammatically and many of their words have the same origins, differences in pronunciation and in many very common words mean that, while it may be very easy for an Italian speaker to learn Spanish, just as it was easy for me to learn Italian after learning French, everyday communication is not that easy. Interestingly, I found it easier to understand P's views on bull fighting and opening the market for illegal drugs than to figure out what he wanted for breakfast, but that may have had something to do with the amount of wine we both drank before the first two conversations started. At one point, though, P. and R. got into a very animated conversation about cock-fighting (la pelea de gallos) and I found myself wondering what people from Wales (el pais de Gales) had done to upset them.

On Wednesday night, I introduced them to aperitivo and Milanese cocktails and we had an evening of complicated but great fun conversation with two of my friends from work. On Thursday, they went sightseeing in town and on Friday we went to the beach. In Milan.

Technically, the “beach” in Milan, which can be found in Piazza Carlo Magno next to the Fiera Milano City, is My Island, an outdoor swimming pool surrounded by sand, artificial grass and sun loungers, which has been created in the middle of what would otherwise look like a building site. The pool is not enormous and it was full of children when we were there, and the bar staff were a bit grumpy, but in a city that has so little outdoor space where you can laze around in the sunshine, it was a nice place to spend an afternoon. As well as the pool, there are tennis and volleyball courts and the whole venue turns into a bar/club at night. Even the DVD of waves crashing on a beach that was projected onto a screen above the pool was quite nice...



until the credits started to roll!

The Power of Words?

There is an advert all over the Milan metro at the moment which shows a woman's coat and legs and bears the slogan “Stilisti, go home.”

The non-English speaking world is plastered with examples of writers who fail to realise that their words may have a double meaning which they never intended to use. (One of my favourites is a sports shop in France called Athlete's Foot.) Given that the advert, which is for the home improvements store Leroy Merlin, is by Saatchi and Saatchi, however, I suspect that the use of this emotive phrase is not accidental and is intented to be provocative in the same way as the recent adverts for a clothing company showing two woman being sexually dominated at a roadside by two armed policemen.

The latter campaign, which was very visual, caused a great deal of controversy, including complaints from the Brazilian government because it had apparently been shot in Brazil. The Leroy Merlin advert, on the other hand, is more subtle, and, given that very few people in Italy will appreciate that it is provocative in the first place, I don't realy see the point of it.

Studying Italian

A few nights ago, I decided it was time to tackle my issues with Italian pronouns head-on. Apart from the fact that I've been working my way through Clelia Boscolo's 30 day revision course Upgrade Your Italian (which is actually a very good study resource) at a rate of 19 days in about 3 years, here is why I have issues with Italian pronouns.

In Italian, as you would expect, there are direct and indirect object pronouns for each person, with different ones for singular and plural and, in some cases, gender. So if, for example, if you want someone to give you a book, you need the pronouns lo (“it”) and mi (“to me”), along with the verb dare (“to give”).

Then you need to remember that in Italian, the mi comes before the lo. Essentially, you say “Give to me it.”

To make your sentence, you need the imperative form of dare. There are two forms, and in this case you need the less common one, da'.

In Italian, when a direct object pronoun and an indirect object pronoun are used together with an imperative, the pronouns combine, as if in English you were saying “Give tomeit.”

When you combine the pronoun mi with another pronoun, it becomes me. (English equivalent: “Give tomiit”)

The pronouns also combine with the verb to make one word, which in English would be “Givetomeit.”

Finally, you need to remember that when the verb da' is combined with a pronoun, you double the initial consonant of the pronoun that follows it, giving the sentence that you actually utter: in Italian, dammelo; in English, "Givettomiit".

By this stage you will probably be too intellectually exhausted to read the book that is, finally, in your sticky hands.

Being the kind of sad person who actually enjoys knowing this kind of thing, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Schaum's Outlines Italian Grammar which is winging its way to me this weekend. In the meantime, however, I discovered this great website with online exercises that you can check your answers to at the click of a button, meaning that you can save all your mental energy for those delightful pronouns.

Misadventures in the Italian Language

Once I had recovered from the shock of my experience with Alice Mobile's “Customer Services” the other day, I realised that my conversation with the woman on the other end raised some interesting sociolinguistic questions.

One of the things that shocked me almost as much as the price of their internet services was the fact that the woman interrupted me when I was speaking. In the UK, that almost never happens, unless the customer is truly ranting, raving and being abusive. In Italy, however, it is generally much more socially acceptable to interrupt and speak when someone else is speaking. (Try dealing with that with a class of 25 children with very loud voices!). What I wonder, therefore, is, would the woman have done that if we had been speaking in English?

Lots of my English speaking friends, even the ones that speak Italian, ask to speak in English in situations like this. I've always tried to speak in Italian, partly because I want to, but also because I've always thought that I'll get better service that way. Maybe this comes from living in France, where people tend to look down their noses at you if you don't have a perfect accent, never mind if you have the audacity to try to speak in English, or maybe it's because I think that if you make the transaction more difficult for them by carrying it out in a foreign language, they're more likely to give up on you when it gets complicated. Other friends in Italy have told me, however, that they've always had good customer service when they've spoken in English, perhaps because Italians are usually proud that they speak English and keen to be able to help by using it.

What I was really wondering, though, was whether, in the same situation, my woman's attitude would have changed if she had been speaking English. When you speak another language, do you take on some of the characteristics of its native speakers? I've noticed that some of my anglophone friends who have been in France a long time don't just sound French when they speak French, they act it as well. In Italian, I felt it was acceptable to interrupt this woman after she had interrupted me, which I wouldn't have done in English. I suspect that if she had actually lived in an anglophone country and picked up its sociolinguistic rules as well as the language, she wouldn't have.