Crêuza de mä
So, let me finish my Ligurian Trilogy then, with a song.
(this is all Ezio Melega's fault, btw)
Songs can be Eidolons... and this song in a way is the eidolon for something that is a combination of culture, people, land, sea... not simply Ligurian, but more generally mediterranean.
Try to listen to it: the instruments are very deliberately a mix from the mediterranean, the language... is Genoan (Genovese Ligurian) and a pretty archaic and difficult version of it. I grew up in western Liguria and have a very hard time understanding this song. To an Italian it is completely unintelligible, save for some words here and there.
This English translation isn't frankly that good, but you can glimpse some of the themes and meanings.
http://lyricstranslate.com/en/creuza-de-mae-mule-sea.html
It is a sequence of images, of flashes, that describe some sailors coming ashore to rest, to eat, but they are uneasy with people that are not of the sea, and in the end they must go back. It is a metaphor of life, in more than a way.
Oh and at the end, those loud shoutings? Those emulate two fishmongers competing in selling their wares in a street market.
Anyway... I fear it's impossible for me to communicate across two languages how deep this song speaks to me and to many others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq1wJcQlDZY
I mean... a full stanza talks about cuisine!
ReplyDeleteAnd what will give to these empty bellies
things to drink, and things to eat
fried small fishes, white wine from Portofino
lamb brains in the same wine
lasagne to be cut to four sauces
pasticcio of sweet and sour "rabbit of the roofs".
Food has a deep, deep cultural meaning. Just knowing what dishes your Rogue loves, or misses from home, you know a lot about him or her.
(fun fact: "rabbit of the roofs" is cat. Nowadays it's illegal, but when people were dirt poor everything went. And Ligurians have been poor for a long, long time)
ReplyDelete...and Giulia Barbano, I think I can hear you chuckle. Yes, I posted about Creuza de ma, again. But this time it was Ezio that pushed me, I swear! :)
ReplyDeleteFun fact, in English the idiomatic phrase for "cooked cat" is... roof hare.
ReplyDeleteSomething is trans-cultural!
Note how the roof hare is listed as a delicacy. between fries and lasagne.
Ah, right, I was sure someone had said that last time this came up but could not remember the term
ReplyDeleteSide note: I admit I got a bit emotional relistening to the song. A bit of saudade, a bit of empathy, a lot of tired. It really got to me.
ReplyDeleteThat was amazing. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even know the Ligurian language existed. The song is beautiful & full of … and I’m not finding the right word. “Wistful” & “bittersweet” aren’t quite rich and earthy enough, I know there’s a better word somewhere. Probably in Ligurian :) Anyway, yeah, amazing song. Thanks for sharing it with us.
ReplyDelete(I’ve never heard of “roof hare”! Sounds like “roof hare” is the unsavory cousin of “mock turtle soup” and “Welsh rabbit”… but not quite as unsavory as “long pig”)
ReplyDeleteRenato Ramonda it was probably me, noting how the English euphemism is identical to the one in my dialect, lévr di cop :-) not cunej (coniglio, rabbit), but lévr (lepre, hare) because they say proper cat has a kind of aftertaste similare to the one game meat has ^^
ReplyDeleteI think Crêuza de mä became so popular despite the linguistic barrier because the emotion De Andrè puts into his words seeps through, almost physical. You feel the sailors' longing, both for the commodity of the land and the call of the sea.
Ed Heil no shame in that, man: this is one of my favorite conversation topics with foreigners because it's absolutely not well known and I love languages.
ReplyDeleteBasically, Italian as a language is an artificial, literary construct, created from scratch in the late 1800s. Only the learned people talked (wrote, mostly) in Italian. And until after WWI, with the radio, and most importantly in the fifties with the diffusion of television, almost nobody really spoke Italian, in Italy.
Each region or macro-region has a dialect that is basically another neo-latin language (just like Italian), and that language is further divided in an infinite constellation of variants, basically one for each 300 people village. Within the same "dialect" area, people tended to understand each other. But people from different regions would have had a pretty hard time communicating (and they did!).
An Italian dialect isn't a cadence, a slightly different accent and a dozen or two of different words. Dialects are full languages, often with different grammar, different language influences, and so on. And most of them never really had a written form, until some recent attempt at saving the poems and songs and proverbs... and they use sounds that Italian letters are not meant to express, so they are hard to write AND to read.
Italian is mostly derived by Tuscan, with a bit of Lombard added, but even a Tuscan speaking in their vernacular native language is pretty hard to understand for someone that is not born there.
The feeling you are trying to describe... yeah, that's very Genoan... i used the brazilian word saudade because that's the best word for it: a bittersweet longing for a distant place.
Apropos of Italian languages I like to say that, usually, an Italian familiar with the language family (let's say he is born in a toen in western Liguria) can pinpoint, using only spoken words, the town of his interlocutor.
ReplyDeleteLavinia and I have been lived 13 kilometers apart, and our dialects are noticeably different (at least for us). In older day the city of Reggio Emilia used to have FIVE different dialects in the historical city alone, an exagon two kilometers wide.
That’s fascinating. That’s a diversity of language so far beyond that of the U.S. it’s hard to even imagine. I had read in Wikipedia that Ligurian is really no more closely related to Italian than French is — they’re independent Romance languages with their own history and sound changes, going back to Latin. I’m glad there are some efforts going on to preserve some of the smaller languages now.
ReplyDeleteI did note when reading the lyrics of the song, “hey, that text doesn’t actually look ANYTHING like what I think of as Italian…."
Yeah... Ligurian has several frenchlike words, but also other influences, and sound wise is pretty unique. The cadence and some sounds are oddly similar to Brazilian Portuguese. And the 'j' sound, for example, does not exist in Italian... But the j letter was already in use in Italian (for the y sound)... So Ligurian uses the x.
ReplyDeleteSo 'maxé' (wall, muro in italian) sounds like majEh, roughly.
The key here is that Italian dialects are not really dialects of the Italian language.
ReplyDeleteThey are the old medieval languages that independently evolved from Latin, not from Italian.
As Renato pointed out before modern Italian is almost an artificial language, born in late XIX when the Florentine language was chosen more or less arbitrarily to become the language of the United Italy but, basically, the other dialects are at the same linguistic level.
I get it now. What we call “Italian" is derived from (a couple of) the Italian “dialects” (really mostly independent Romance languages with separate histories and identities), not the other way round.
ReplyDeleteEd Heil I have no idea why, but two of your comments were flagged or marked as spam (possibly by me)... I restored them (I suspect I might have clicked 'report spam' by accident, sorry)
ReplyDeleteThanks!
ReplyDeleteEd Heil, Manzoni was instrumental in the birth of "modern" Italian. He was beloved by the early unitarian government and was a sort of "state novelist".
ReplyDeleteHe wrote The Betrothed using a mostly Lombard language, but then rewrote them in Florentine (he said to want to "wash his clothes in Arno") looking at Dante, Boccaccio, S. Francis and, especially, Petrarca.
That operation was instrumental in defining the concept of "modern" Italian.
I was kind of wondering how people like Dante, who we think of as writing in “Italian” long before there was a modern Italian, fit into the picture.
ReplyDeleteWell, they wrote in their own vulgar, that was Tuscan, and they were so relevant to the post-Unity intellectuals that they were selecter as "fathers of the language".
ReplyDeleteBut, even between them there are great differences in language.
Dante (1265-1321) uses different register in his Commedia: the Inferno is a "low" language, very similar to the true vulgar spoke in Florentine taverns, while the Paradiso is a very refined vulgar, with a lot of latin in it (the classic example is the word "senior" that in the Inferno is veglio and in Paradise is the latin senex). Dante is not readily accessible to modern Italians, he uses strange words and the poetic meter complicates the syntaxis, but he can be read with a little effort by high school students.
Boccaccio (1313-1315) uses in his Decameron a very "vulgar" language, very Florentine, very true to the spoken word and is often much more difficult than Dante.
Petrarca (1304-1374) is the most refined. For his Canzoniere he research a language that, while it is recognisable as Florentine, is polished and removed of many latinism. Petrarca is almost immediatly readable from a moder Italian, it's astounding.
Other important poets and literates started using their vulgar durin XIV century, and we have several testimoniances of those "low languages". The oldest known piece of vulgar literatur is St. Francis' Canticle of the Sun (1224), written in the vulgar of Perugia, similar to Tuscan but with marked differences. It's easily accessible from the modern reader if he knows how a couple of words changed meaning in modern Italian.
Dialectal poetry is still very alive today, with poets and even theatre companies perfoming in local dialects.
ReplyDeleteOnce I saw The Merry Wives of Windsor performed in Reggio Emilia dialect.
It was fantastic ^^
At home I'll search for a couple of videos talked in my dialect and/or Neapoletan, so you can compare them to Genoan...
It sounds like, if I were to make an analogy to English, the various medieval Italian vernacular poets vary from Chaucer-like (difficult but achievable) to Shakespeare-like (completely understandable except for some archaic word choices) in terms of their accessibility to modern Italians.
ReplyDeleteEd Heil, here we are.
ReplyDeletecommedia dialettale tito e palanca
This is a teathrical piece in my dialect. The son, emigrant to America, comes back and his old father experiments a bit of cultural and generational crash. They talk quite a light dialect, with several Italian influences.
It's from Reggio Emilia, North Italy, nera Bologna or Modena. It's a typical Emilian dialect, with longbard origins and heavily influenced by French, even if not as much as , Ligurian. It's totally diffent language, even if we are not far and historically connected.
Modena City Ramblers - Al Dievel ( Il comandante Diavolo )
This is a song in a language that is a little mix of the dialects from Reggio Emilia, Modena and Carpi (they are all dialects of the same Emilian language). I can hear evident differences from the one talked in the city of Reggio Emilia proper.
It talks about a Partisan whose battle name was "Devil", a controversial local figure.
La vedova scaltra Carlo Goldoni
This in an important piece. It's a Goldoni comedy in Venetian. The two noblewomen talk an Italian "coloured" with Venetian influeces, while Harlequin talks a much more pure Venetian (but not escessively "strict")
Le poesie di Eduardo De Filippo - O VILLOCO NUN PORT O MBRELLO
This is Neapoletan. The voice is the Eduardo de Filippo, the most important interpeter of Neapoletan theater in the second half of the XX century. It is a poem that advices the young boys to go around carrying an umbrella, maybe second-handed, because it is easy to approach a girl offering repair when it rains.
These are all "Italians"
Fascinating! So do most people speak their local dialect at home, and standard Italian when they travel and need to speak to someone in another area with another dialect? Or do you try speaking dialects and hope there’s enough mutual intelligibility? Or a bit of both, depending on how different the local dialects are?
ReplyDeleteDepends on the regions, IME. Some have retained a stronger attachment to dialect and more youngsters talk in the local idiom as a first language (venetian and neapolitan are the most prominent probably). Also, city vs country: in the rural areas it's much more common to hear dialect conversations than in cities.
ReplyDeleteAlso age: dialect is in decline, and young people can easily grow up without really knowing any. I understand Ligurian (mostly) but I am not really a speaker.
ReplyDeleteMy language nerdiness means I actually picked up several bits of different dialects, but have little accent myself (and thank goodness: Imperian accent is pretty terrible)
ReplyDeleteDialect is often seen as uneducated and rough. More refined the people, the less abitually used is the dialect.
ReplyDeleteYou have to understand that in many ways dialects are an obstacle. A person from Milan cannot possibly understand a person from Neaple if they talk their dialects, and I swear that Italy already has enough reasons to be divided.
So we lived a true war to dialects, born out of necessity but that destroyed a great linguistic treasure.
It's difficult. Dialects are wonderful but they also are often use as a divisive tool instead of an enrichment of the whole country.
This means a marked difference between generations, city/countryside and north/south factors.
Internal immigration also murked the linguistic water.
I, for example, don't usually speak dialect. I can easily understand Emilian language but have an hard time talking it.
I can say that up north I rarely hear speaking dialect if not by older people, while when I go south dialect I hear almost only dialect.
But apart from accent, that is a common feature in all languages, there are telltales. Almost nobody uses a "pure" Italian. Little dialectal terms filter in our language.
For example I often call my S.O. "tata". A Venetian word that literraly means "sister" but is a term of edearment in our local lingo and it will sound alien to anyone south of the Appennines.
Tuscans are particularly fun. They haven't a real dialect, their vulgar beign the fundaments of Italian, but they talk a peculiar form of it, full of old terms and they are usually totally convinced it is "true Italian" instead of another regional variation.h
I once overhead a technical discussion about electronic in a strong Venetian-influenced Italian. With translated terms. It was... Instructive.
ReplyDeleteEd Heil it depends. I'm (almost) 25 and grew up in a household where my parents spoke Italian to/with my brother and me, and dialect with my grandparents (who in turn spoke/speak dialect or an Italian heavily influenced by dialect). At school, with friends etc. Italian was the language spoken.
ReplyDeleteYet, I speak an Italian riddled with words and sentence structures from my dialect (sometimes without really knowing that a specific word isn't Italian!) and can comprehend almost everything spoken by a fluent speaker of my area or a close one (and I can have a simple conversation).
I can correctly pronounce some Italian phonemes that my grandmother is completely unable to articulate and the same is true for some dialectal ones.
I think it's due to living in a very rural area where dialect was never truly considered "bad form" or a sign of ignorance, and even people with a higher education needed to know the dialect to communicate with others until very recently, and also to the fact that I'm very good at learning languages by listening and assimilating sounds and pronounciations. I do, however, have some big vocabulary holes and often find difficult recalling a specific dialectal word even if I know it.
My native language is Italian, and I speak English better than my dialect. Dialects are disappearing, but I get the feeling that it's a slower process than it seems and hugely geographically and culturally subjective.
Ed Heil look what I just stumbled into
ReplyDeletehttp://i.imgur.com/xVWwRid.png
Bear in mind, this map (as any map of Italian dialects) can't be accurate, and there are probably people in Italy that would get very defensive or offended about some of those lines.
Also bear in mind, within those small areas that delimit variant/dialects of the same language, the variation is pretty much endless. My own village is a municipality of 600 people divided in 4 smaller settlements. The next village over is similar, and less than 1Km away.
Our dialects are markedly different.
This probably goes back to at least the renaissance, because even if they are so close, our village was part of the Genoan maritime republic territories, while the nearby one was part of the Church domains: one more reason not lo like one's neighbors ;)
Notice the white Sardinia. Sardinia has at least four different languages in its territory, only one distantly related to Italian.
ReplyDeleteLook Lavinia Fantini, there is carpigiano, your dialect!
Yeah, I was going to point out: this map correctly leaves those that are entirely unrelated languages out: that's why it doesn't cover the whole of Italy (but covers bits of Switzerland and the French Riviera).
ReplyDeleteThe westernmost part of Piedmont (on the alps) is Occitan (the other French language, though the French seem to have mostly forgotten about it). My dad's dialect is right on the border of the Occitan region. I have distant cousins whose first language is not Italian: I heard their kids play and talk among themselves in Occitan and I don't understand a bit of it.
Val D'Aosta speaks Valdoutain, and that's more a dialect of French than anything.
Friuli speaks Furlan, and that's another language again (that's why Friuli Venezia Giulia is mostly grey, with small pockets of Veneto dialects... also why Friulan people from the mountains take offense when you lump them with the people from the coast).
I’m learning interesting things on Wikipedia about the history of some of these languages; supposedly Neapolitan may possibly preserve some elements of the long-dead Oscan language (a sister language to Latin), and Sardinian probably preserves traces of the long-dead Nuragic, the non-Indo-European language spoken in Sardinia in ancient times. Perhaps protecting and preserving some of these dialects may not just be a matter of local pride but also may preserve vital evidence of otherwise lost and unknown languages, for historical linguists.
ReplyDelete(That’s with reference to the separate Sardinian language, not the Italian dialects of Sardinia, but the same principle applies all over, I’m sure)
ReplyDeleteYou are right, of course, but it also sad to hear kids that grow up in the XXI century beign almost unable to talk with anyone born one hundred kilometers apart because they never learned any other language, not even correct Italian, and it happens, especially in the poorer zones of the South.
ReplyDeleteThey are a treasure but and up beign a liability and this is very sad.
Yeah, those that are classified as "language minorities" (like the Ladin, the Occitan and I think the Sardinians) receive funds from the state and the EU to help preserve those languages. It's an uphill battle, though: Italian is pretty much irrelevant internationally, and people better learn English or Chinese... finding the energy to keep dialects alive is hard.
ReplyDeleteAlso, what Ezio said: in the most poor parts of southern Italy kids can (and do) grow up speaking very little Italian.
ReplyDeleteAnyone with that language baggage will have another huge burden to bear, added to the pre-existing conditions of poverty, ignorance and influence from organized crime: between a sicilian boy that talks good Italian, even with a strong accent, and one that stumbles on it... the Italian speaker will get the job.
Always go to work interviews showing the least accent possible and avoiding local expressions.
ReplyDeleteYes, I suppose preserving minority languages might be a luxury a community can't always afford. :(
ReplyDelete