A look at our life as we learn to navigate Italian culture
What I wanted to say:
Posso incoraggiare, e posso scoraggiare. I can encourage and I can discourage.
What I said:
Posso incoraggiare, e posso scoreggiare. I can encourage and I can fart.
What a difference one little letter makes.
It was just under five years ago that we moved to Italy. Five years in, we feel pretty good about our grasp of the Italian language. We rarely find ourselves in situations where we can’t at least follow the conversation. Our funny accent still makes the Italians look at us funny when we talk, but we get the point across. I preach about half the sermons on Sundays (and the church is very gracious about it!). Overall, we do OK.
And then something happens that makes me realize we have a long way to go: dialect.
I took the boys to get their hair cut yesterday (both got a faux-hawk). The guy that cuts their hair is from Naples. I can tell he’s not from Ancona from his accent, but I’m still not to the point where I can pinpoint where a person is from just from hearing them. At a certain point, the kids started asking him to say things in his dialect. We laughed as he repeated everyday words into something that wasn’t even close to the standard Italian that we learned. It sounded more Arab than Italian.
And then his friend came in – another person from Naples. He turned to us and said, “You want to hear some dialect? Watch this.” And then they spoke a language that was completely foreign to us. Sometimes a syllable or two would sound familiar. Every now and then a word would stick out. But if you asked any of us to translate, we would have come up blank.
It’s funny, because it seems like Italians have a love/hate relationship with dialect. On one hand, it’s seen as something that the elderly or uneducated speak. Many say that it sounds bad. But the second they meet someone from their hometown, dialect becomes their secret code language. Even the little noises we make to fill space in conversation (ummm, uhhh, etc.) are different. And in a very real way, in the back of their minds as they speak dialect with a paesano, it’s like they are thinking, “Finally, someone who understand me!”
There’s lots of American TV on here in Italy. We can watch Lost, sometimes just a few episodes behind (and dubbed into Italian). Heroes has also been dubbed. Lots of the Law and Order shows are on. And we also get the classics. Like The Cosby Show. Except it’s not The Cosby Show here. It’s I Robinson – The Robinsons.
Side note: Why was it called The Cosby Show if their name on the show was Huxtable?
So why did they change the name of the show (and the family) in Italian? I’ve heard several theories, but the most plausible is quite simple: Huxtable would be difficult to pronounce in Italian. The “H” is always silent in Italian, and is only used to change the sound of other letters. The “X” has a “Z” sound. And almost every word in Italian ends in a vowel sound (in English it ends in a vowel, but not a vowel sound).
But if you zoom out a little bit, you see how difficult it can be to take this American show, with all of its little cultural inside jokes, and transplant it into another place. And so if the show’s theme would be difficult to translate, just take the idea and put it into an Italian context. If the name’s too difficult, just change it.
Context is everything!
I have been puzzled by something lately. I went to the doctor the other day, and he prescribed an inhaler for me. The directions for taking the medicine are as follows:
Pr. VENTOYLN spray
S. Un puff al bisogno (massimo quattro volte al giorno)
Obviously there are two English words in those two short phrases: spray and puff. In Italian, the word for spray is spruzzo. The Italian word for puff is sbuffo or soffio.
So why is the English word used? I can understand using an English word for something that originated in English, or for which there isn’t a word in Italian. But I see more and more frequently English creeping into the conversation. Italians have a beautiful language that I hope to someday master, but it seems like if I just wait around long enough the job will get easier and easier.
I have to say it … one of the most fascinating parts of learning Italian has been learning the more colorful phrases. Obviously, our kids have picked up some pretty good ones. There’s an expression in Italian: Che cavolo! Literally, what cabbage! It’s not a bad thing to say, and in fact is even a sort of childish expression. It’s probably closest in English to “What on earth?” or maybe “Oh my!” But it’s a hard thing to translate.
Except for Trey, who I heard say in English the other day (without batting an eye), “What cabbage!”
Movies in Italy are almost always dubbed, which means we usually have to wait a bit after a movie comes out in the US before it comes out here. Apparently there was a movie out called Superbad a while back. I’ve never seen it (and I don’t think I will) but I had to chuckle when I saw the poster advertising this movie here. It was called Suxbad. The letter “x” is often used as an abbreviation for per, a conjunction. So an Italian would pronounce the title correctly: Su-per-bad.
But this foreigner wondered why anyone would call a movie sucks-bad. It was a couple of weeks before I got it.
Even before we left the US, I was a little concerned about whether or not the Italian was going to come back after six months of little use. Some friends of ours who moved from Italy invited us over for dinner just before we came back to Italy. They speak a crazy mix of Italian, Spanish, and English at home, so we settled on Italian as the common language. And it was tough. It sort of reminded me that I really did lose some of that ability.
But somehow a switch has been flipped. It started at customs at the airport, when I had to explain to the agent why I was bringing 12 pieces of luggage, plus carry-ons, into Ancona. But I pulled it off!
Then today I noticed that the kids started calling me papà instead of dad. Later, Trey told me a story, and after realizing there were Italians around, he switched to Italian. All of these are little things that make me think that we will be able to switch back into our second language.
But keep reading the blog to read about all of our language goofs!
So I suppose by now I can be considered bilingual, though I still stutter and stammer my way through Italian on occasion. I noticed this weird little quirk when we were in Germany, an obviously non-Italian-speaking country. Whenever someone started speaking to me in German, Italian would come out. Many people in Germany speak English. But for some reason my brain heard German, switched into foreign language mode, and Italian came out. I had to force myself to use English.
Have any other bilingual people out there experienced something similar? And what language comes out when you’re trilingual?!
I just finished checking our daughter’s homework. She had to write a story of a conversation between her and the Christmas tree. I came across this word that I hadn’t see before: hocchei. Very few words in Italian begin with an “h,” so I knew something wasn’t right.
I asked Chloe what she meant, and she said, “You know, like when they say o-kay” It then dawned on me that she had phonetically spelled the English word “OK,” which Italians use all the time. I told her how to spell “OK” and that it was an English word, and she was surprised.
My kids really do speak Italian well…
Today a CD-ROM I ordered arrived in the mail. I’ve been looking for a really good Italian dictionary to help in lesson writing. The Italian-English one that I have is great, but it doesn’t define the words, it only gives you the translation. So you lose some of the original meaning. I was happy to find a dictionary on CD-ROM – so much easier to use than a big heavy book.
I was showing the kids how to use it, since they often need to look up words for their homework. I left the room to let them play around. In about 8 seconds they learned how to get the program to pronounce the words shown. And then they figured out how to make it say “poop” and “pee” and other fun words like that. Aren’t they precious?