italians and the english language...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAFQFvSPhQ8&feature=related

ludwig, i apologize for i know that you can't see the videos from tutubo, but i've nothing to add, it has to be seen...

This is not about Italians but Germans and the English language, it's a stream and maybe you can see it:

http://www.introbia.ch/download/public/WeAreSinking.swf

Unbeatable

jessica ha scritto:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAFQFvSPhQ8&feature=related

ludwig, i apologize for i know that you can't see the videos from tutubo, but i've nothing to add, it has to be seen...

Yep! I forgot to post this one!!

Funny thing is, the story about the Italian in Malta is older than the web itself and seems to come from the US. First time I heard it, it was in Tucson, 1993

however I think it sums up very well part of my difficulties...
all the words with ght gth ecc
ought through tought ggghthgg
or more simply night (e infatti anche molti di loro la cannano in nite)
beech and beach
and all the letters that you read in some way if they're in some words and in other ways if they're in other words...

instead i noticed that for english a problem in the italian lenguage is the gender, an english girl told me: why il mare is male? sea is sea, not woman or man, only sea...

Talking with accent is common and it is always hilarious. I wish to say also that anglophone ladies appreciate Italian accents since the first announcement that says, “ladies and gentlemen a-welcome a-to da airport a-Leonardo da Vinci, please a-remain a-seated till a-da engines are a-not switched a-off a”.

Last year I saw the movie version of "Miami Vice" and I hardly understood a word, I was more astonished when a Canadian friend of mine said that he would have had the same problem with that South American slang (by the way Canadians don't say “house” they say “hoose”). I still think it was more a problem of mine because I actually don't have a mother tongue.

There is a lot to see about accents in the web, try your search engines with “shadda up you face” by Joe Dolce and Russell Peters too is very interesting.

During meetings I attend abroad, these things happen:

Sorry a-but a-my English is a-not a-very good a. (to that you may get an encouraging answer!)

If a-you give a-me a shit a-of paper a-I can a-shov a-you. (who dares?)

“Come cazzo si dice”, sorry if I speak a-Italian. (some people learn Italian and probably will say it at this time just to avoid critical situations)

“Che cazzo ha detto”, sorry if I speak a-Italian.

“Ammazza che schifo sta roba che mangiano”, sorry if I speak a-Italian.

“Ah, lei parla Italiano”, sorry if I speak a-Italian... me lo potevate dire però!

jessica ha scritto:however I think it sums up very well part of my difficulties...
all the words with ght gth ecc
ought through tought ggghthgg
or more simply night (e infatti anche molti di loro la cannano in nite)
beech and beach
and all the letters that you read in some way if they're in some words and in other ways if they're in other words...

instead i noticed that for english a problem in the italian lenguage is the gender, an english girl told me: why il mare is male? sea is sea, not woman or man, only sea...

Only things in English are feminine are bitch (not "beech") and ship. Everything else is "it"

Sergio, don't cheat. You do have a native language, and it is Italian

Rasputin ha scritto:
Only things in English are feminine are bitch (not "beech") and ship. Everything else is "it"
Sergio, don't cheat. You do have a native language, and it is Italian

why you think the worst??!!!
i meant the tree (beech) not the poor girl (bitch) for which the pronunciation is quite different!

jessica ha scritto:

Rasputin ha scritto:
Only things in English are feminine are bitch (not "beech") and ship. Everything else is "it"
Sergio, don't cheat. You do have a native language, and it is Italian

why you think the worst??!!!
i meant the tree (beech) not the poor girl (bitch) for which the pronunciation is quite different!

Beh la cannata in genere è più frequente tra beach e bitch, beech è un vocabolo meno conosciuto ed in genere chi lo conosce canna difficilmente

Oh, but is not a real cannata, the problem is that i can't understand the difference beetween the two pronunciation at all! (actually is non a word really useful, but the problem was posed when I had to do a sort of botanic course to poor English-speaking children... ----the problem was posed è giusto? intendevo il problema si è posto----)

There are several, if not many, words in English which are spelled differently but pronounced the same way, for instance pair (Paio) and pear (Pera)...

Elegantly, you can say "The problem at issue was correct"? "To pose" means sort of show off, try and look for "Poser" in a dictionary

ooohhh so beach and beech have the same pronunciation? here it is the reason for my misunderstanding!!!

si... ma perchè
dear e pear si dovrebbero pronunciare in maniera diversa????
e peer? dear e deer? bah...

they are barbarians...

Well, not that I am so good at speaking(or writing) English, but...

Have you ever seen the English schoolbooks, used to teach it?
They're full of mistakes about vocabulary, and grammar errors as well. And let alone the teachers. I had two teachers, during secondary school, and none of them really knew the language. The one that I had for literature, never explained (or rather knew, now that I think about it) Walt Whitman, that I asked her to explain(he's one of most important poets in American literature), and I had to explain it myself to the classroom! And all the other Authors we never studied... Byron, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Woolf...

I'm not surprised that italian people(in general) wouldn't speak english well, if even their teachers didn't.

jessica ha scritto:ooohhh so beach and beech have the same pronunciation? here it is the reason for my misunderstanding!!!

si... ma perchè
dear e pear si dovrebbero pronunciare in maniera diversa????
e peer? dear e deer? bah...

they are barbarians...

They have only almost the same pronunciation, which at the end of the day comes out as about the same. Aside from that, everybody says the same about other languages, and we are generally unable to see exactly the same oddities in our own; just to give you an example, "Cuore" is spelled with "C" but "Quota" with "Q" (Quo sounds exactly the same whether it is spelled with "C" or with "Q"). Cases of words with exactly the same sound but spelled differently are more in some languages and less in some others (In Italian none comes up my mind right now), but you should bear in mind that to a foreigner the difficulties are the same.

@Wolf: the problem you brought at issue seems to be the same everywhere. I finished university in Spain, at the time and also before my English was already fluent and I used to go out for a couple of beers with a spanish friend, professor of philosophy at the same university who also spoke fluent English, an american friend, and my english professor. Nice guy, but we always ended up talking in Spanish because his spoken English was broken to the extent of making him ashamed...

Believe it or not William Shakespeare who often turned nouns into verbs, creating an entirely new usage, for example “to beach” and many other similar was simply borrowing terms from Italian, this example would be “spiaggiare”.

Guglielmo Scrollalancia was born in Messina, he escaped the holy inquisition and went to live in London. These Sicilians are scattered everywhere!

Rasputin ha scritto:They have only almost the same pronunciation, which at the end of the day comes out as about the same. Aside from that, everybody says the same about other languages, and we are generally unable to see exactly the same oddities in our own; just to give you an example, "Cuore" is spelled with "C" but "Quota" with "Q" (Quo sounds exactly the same whether it is spelled with "C" or with "Q"). Cases of words with exactly the same sound but spelled differently are more in some languages and less in some others (In Italian none comes up my mind right now), but you should bear in mind that to a foreigner the difficulties are the same.

you're right, but quore in italian means nothing...
the only strange things, regarding the pronunciation,are sc, ch, gn, gl...
however i'm in accord with you: we could erase the letter Q from our alphabet!
take a look here (the first piece):
http://pensierietc.blogspot.com/

jessica ha scritto:
you're right, but quore in italian means nothing...

Sure it does, as long as you don't have to spell it

jessica ha scritto:the only strange things, regarding the pronunciation,are sc, ch, gn, gl...
however I agree with you: we could erase the letter Q from our alphabet!
take a look here (the first piece):
http://pensierietc.blogspot.com/

No need, I know. We could also remove th "Ch" and use the "K"

...and so on and so fort...

inutile stare a parlarne u basta. penso proprio che comincero a metterlo in pratica da qui!

jessica ha scritto:

inutile stare a parlarne u basta. penso proprio che comincero a metterlo in pratica da qui!

Occhio però, ci sono dei puristi che potrebbero adontarsi

Pensa che gli spagnoli hanno ridondanze alfabetiche ancora maggiori, la ll che si pronuncia come la y (Equivale alla nostra gl anche se non è proprio la stessa cosa), la ñ che è riproducibile anche con la combinazione di n + y (Corretto anche grammaticalmente), la x come la j, ecc...

In an Indian restaurant, after lunch, a gentleman keeping the door open said, "Kana kale?". I spontaneously assigned to "kale" something positive like the Greek word "kala" which means "good" and to "kana" something I must have just done (eat). I said, "Kale kana, shukria!". Shukria means "thank you" in Urdu and derives from Arabic, I never remember how to say it in Hindi.

I was indeed asked if I had a good meal, "ate graciously?". I thought; “Indo-Europeans do it the same way”.

Somewhere near the actual Black and Caspian Seas, those who then became Germans, Greeks, Italians and all the remaining Europeans, moved towards West and South, to settle in Northern Europe, the Greek and Italian peninsulas. Then others to the Balkans, others back to the East and round the black sea up to Armenia. Finally the last two, moving Est and South, went to the areas of Iran and the Indian peninsula.

This is a simplification and I am not considering the Spaniards, the Gypsies the far east and America.

These humans... were they speaking the same language? Probably looking at ancient words we can guess the commonality because modern idiomatic expressions lead to misunderstanding. Take the word "interface", it has yes Latin roots, "between" and "face", common at least to all Romance languages, but it was composed in America and it is a neologism for data exchange between mechanical, electrical or electronic parts. Even if it would not surprise any body if this word was used also in the ancient times, like; "Roman diplomatic talks were -interfaced- through interpreters".

In Sanskrit "Aster" means star, see if this is not common to all Indo-European languages? Astro, Astre, Star, Stern - By the way - "astrum" became esterula (diminutive),estrella, strella, stella, estela, estele, ste, etoile (missed something?).

Once in Libya I heard people say “couple” instead of two (why not?) consider to start with a noun, adjective or adverb, like “ahead”, “single”, “apple” depending upon the quantity to be described. Actually this can be an answer for Sanskrit or Hittitish for not having the first number. Curious that there are languages where after two there is “many”, apple, couple of apples, many apples.

The sound of numbers from 1 to 10 in some languages, note the non Indoeuropean last 5 how they are different.

Language	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Sanskrit		dvau	trayas	catvarah	panca	sas	sapta	astau	nava	dasa
Greek	oinos	duo	treis	tessares	pente	hex	hepta	okto	ennea	deka
Latin	unus	duo	tres	quattuor	quinque	sex	septem	octo	novem	decem
Hindi	ek	do	tin	chor	paanch	che	saat	aat	nau	das
Armenian	mek	yerku	yerek	chors	hink	vets	yot	ut	in	das
Persian	yek	dow	seh	cha'har	pang	shesh	haft	hasht	noh	dah
Hittitish		da	tri	meu			sipta
Kurdish	yek	du	se	swar	penc	shesh	hevt	hesht	no	de
Romani	ekh, jekh	duj	trin	štar	pandž	šov	ifta	oxto	inja	deš
Lomavren	yak, yek	lui	tərin	išdör	pendž	šeš	haft	hašt	nu	las
Domari	yika	dī	tærən	štar	pandž	šaš	xaut	xaišt	na	des
Arabic	wahed	ethnen	thalata	arbaa	khamsa	sitta	sabaa	tamania	tisia	ashara
Basque	bat	bi	hiru	lau	bos	se	zazpi	zortzi	bederatzi	amar
Hungarian	Egy	Ketto	Három	Négy	Öt	Hat	Hét	Nyolc	Kilenc	Tíz
Finnish	yksi	kaksi	kolme	neljä	viisi	kuusi	seitsemän	kahdeksan	yhdeksän	kymmenen
Turkish	bir	iki	ooch	dort	besh	altu	yedi	sekiz	dokuz	on

Rasputin said that there are no national or cultural identities and we all belong to planet Earth. That is true and I like it very much but it is a conclusive point - the objective. If there wasn't an Italian container what could I have been called? Tuscan-Terrestrial? Opposed to any other Terrestrial I would certainly be weaker than what I am today as an Italian.

Ah ah! I had to join this forum to find out that I'm a patriot, I really never thought I was a patriot! Maybe it's just common sense!

Back to fun things, two jokers have spent their time in Airports, in this case London Heathrow, by writing down strange names on pieces of paper then asking the Information Centre to call for the persons named on the paper through the airport loudspeaker system. They then placed themselves under one of the speakers and made a recording of the result.

To make the whole thing more believable they dressed like taxi drivers and asked for help to announce the calls about 40 minutes after the arrival of e.g. Thai Airways or Air India.

These guys really should have the Big Entertainment Prize!

Check it out:

http://zwergenkoenig.com/british-humor/

also available as a word file containing sounds, downloadable here:

http://humour.200ok.com.au/doc/publicannouncment.doc

I'm still laughing (and coughing because I'm bedridden with a bronchitis), incredible!

In one of my trips a hostess asked me how to say in Italian “fasten your seat belts” so that she would say it … I told her to say “Mi slaccio la giarrettiera” and she did it! Nothing to do with this one of yours!

SergioAD ha scritto:I'm still laughing (and coughing because I'm bedridden with a bronchitis), incredible!

In one of my trips a hostess asked me how to say in Italian “fasten your seat belts” so that she would say it … I told her to say “Mi slaccio la giarrettiera” and she did it! Nothing to do with this one of yours!

This reminds me of the time when my friends and I as teenagers used to teach counting in Italian to the Dutch girls in holiday at a lake near my hometown, then watching them go shopping for their parents and order 4 breadrolls and so on...