Ciao! Come sta? Sto molto bene.*
Some of you may have noticed that two of my recent posts have dealt with taboo words. In one of those threads, ildi mentioned Rick Steve, a travel writer and tour guide whose image is that of, as she put it, “a clean-cut middle-class American.”
As it happens, the deacon and I will be traveling to Italy this spring (a factoid that I mentioned here). In preparation for our trip, the deacon gave me Rick Steve’s guides to Venice and Rome as Christmas gifts. This past weekend, I ordered three Italian phrase books from Amazon, two of which arrived yesterday. One of these was Rick Steve’s Italian Phrase Book and Dictionary. Eager to start learning some rudimentary Italian (it may be useful to know, at the very least, how to ask where the bathroom is (Dov’e la toilette? – if you must know)), I perused both books last night. I’m sorry to report that I have not yet committed them to memory. Give me a few weeks and I’ll get back to you on that (ha! I wish!).
As I neared the end of Rick Steve’s book, I was amazed and, I must confess, delighted, to come across this entry:
As musical as these words and phrases sound as they roll off the tongue, I still like the four-letter Anglo-Saxon words to which I am accustomed. For example, “dannazione” is, on my tongue, much more cumbersome than “damn it!” And “vaffanculo” sounds too pleasant to mean “fuck you.” Nor do I think I’ll ever get the hang of saying “merda” when a simple “shit” will suffice. I will admit, though, that “balle” is growing on me, and may soon be nearly as useful a word to me as “bullshit” is. There’s also a strong possibility that “sei uno stronzo” may become a handy substitute for “you are an asshole.” Who knows? Even though I’ve forgotten most of my high school Spanish, I may yet end up getting the hang of this foreign language stuff. In the meantime, I’d better hit the books and learn some words that are more suitable for mixed company.
Uno, due, tre, quattro…
– the chaplain
* Hi. How are you? I am very well.
Vinny
February 23, 2010 at 11:45 pm
A La Boulangerie.
A qui le tour?
Je crois que c’est a moi.
Eh bien. Vous desirez?
Une baguette sil vous plais et une demi-douzaine de croissants.
Voulez-vous le brioche? Ce sont la specialite de la maison.
No. Merci. C’est tout pour adjour dui.
Merci beaucoup.
Merci beaucoup.
I think that is the second dialogue from my high school freshman French book, circa 1971. My wife and I are hoping to get to France next year and the first thing I’m going to do is find a bakery and order a loaf of bread and and a half dozen crescent rolls.
desertscope
February 23, 2010 at 11:59 pm
There is a little girl at my son’s school whose parents are French and German. She speaks to her mother in German, her father in French, and English in school, where she studies Chinese and Spanish. She is in the first grade. We are so disadvantaged.
I could once do passable German. Then I began using Spanish daily, which quickly replaced the German. Then I studied Chinese, and the same happened to the Spanish. When I was in China, I found that I was barely able to cobble together the most basic thoughts in German (a lot of Germans in Beijing, strangely enough). When I was in Mexico last year, I could barely understand newscasts with pictures. I bet next time I go to China, I won’t even be able to read a menu.
If only I were a child again.
PhillyChief
February 24, 2010 at 12:10 am
Honestly, and Italian phrase book should come with pictures of hand gestures. Italian without hand gestures is like English from Stephen Hawking.
Anyway, it looks like Rick was too much of a figa to put “fuck” in his book and opted for “screw it”. Lame. Anyway, try to use both arms when you say it, and use a fist, not the ol’ single digit.
More times than not, slangs derive from food, although I don’t know how fennel got associated with gays.
Nova
February 24, 2010 at 3:57 am
One interesting aspect of italian is that there are countless ways of cursing and insulting, and half of them involve religion or sex. Those two slim pages don’t minimally cover the range and ingenuity of italian insults.
One of my favorite is “Fatti una padellata di cazzi tuoi” (Mind your business).
Larry Wallberg
February 24, 2010 at 4:34 am
A few colorful phrases you might enjoy using. They’re basically the Italian equivalents of “Oh, shit!” but much more fun to say:
porco dio! (god is a pig!) and porco cane! (god is a dog!)
Madonna puttana! (Virgin Mary the whore!)
the chaplain
February 24, 2010 at 5:40 am
Vinny:
Enjoy your trip to France. I know their bread is good, but I hope you sample some other foods – and wines! – while you’re there.
desertscope:
I’m really embarrassed about being monolingual. My eldest son did six years of elementary school in a French immersion program. The only chance he’s had to use his French since he finished high school was when he traveled to France a few years ago, so he’s not nearly as fluent as he used to be.
Philly:
I noticed the “screw it” thing and said to myself, “I bet that’s not quite right.” I googled “vaffanculo” and the first link I found was the one in the OP. It’s kind of lame to dedicate a page or so to profanity and then wuss out on one of the major terms. That’s the power of taboo for you. I’ll work on my gestures.
Nova:
I agree that this passage offers pretty slim pickings, but it’s definitely more than I ever found in my high school Spanish books.
Larry:
Those three phrases roll right off the tongue. Madonna puttana! sounds like it could be the opening phrase of a children’s rhyming game.
Sarge
February 24, 2010 at 7:12 am
I speak German, Russian (now very rusty, but due to a family of immigrants on our block it is picking up again), and Esperanto. By my grades, yea, many years ago, English? Not so much.
In the late 1970a we were stationed in Nurnberg we sent our youngest son to the German school, and he was fluent in both English and German. I was the only American he would speak German with, for some reason. He would speak German to Germans, English to Americans and British people.
Our detachment was small, but there were five of us who spoke German pretty well, so translating wasn’t too much of a problem if one was needed. But sometimes if none of us were available people would “borrow” my son, a five year old boy, to translate for them. They would input English, he would stand for a minute, process, turn to the German person and speak to him in German. The German would answer in German, he stood a moment, turned to the American, and answered in English. Sort of like a flesh and blood translating machine.
He and his family are stationed in Sicily now, and his own sons go to the local Italian school and are bi-lingual. So are he and my daughter-in-law, and it really comes in handy. They’ve been able to see and do a lot more than most other people because of it.
I used to be able to hold a conversation in Vietnamese (a more southern dialect) but I couldn’t now.
Our immigrant neighbors speak pretty good English when it comes to WORDS, but sometimes there are problems. Especially since my own English dialect is Virginia/Appalachian Hick variety. Not long ago I was asked a question by these folks and answered by saying “Yup”. I’d forgotten what that was slang for, and they were horrified. Also, here in Pencil Tuckey, there is an apparent demigod, much revered, but they were puzzled about why people (they heard the abbreviation of his name, “Joe-Pah) who seemed to worship him called him “Asshole”.
I explained about the shortening of his name…but, then again, maybe people are more correct than they know!
Sarge
February 24, 2010 at 7:38 am
You have to be careful, though. Translations are not always certain, culturally.
My first tour in Germany I was able to do a lot of travelling (pre-maried days), and there were other multi-lingual guys that I went with.
One was a guy from Quebec. He was an ardent seperatist and Francophile, and he, of course, spoke excellent French. His Francophilism didn’t last much past suppertime of the first day, however.
But besides that, we saw people in Nancy eating these small ice cream cones with three little scoops of ice cream. He asked for one, got a dish with one scoop of ice cream in the middle and three cones around it. He consulted a person who had a cone, “a la mode” as it were, tried again using the words he’d just been taught with a different vendor, and got the same thing. Go figure.
One of the guys I went to Italy with was from a section of New York City that was “Little Italy” and he spoke Italian very well…he thought.
We were in Milan, and he whipped out his Italian, but people just kind of looked at him and said they didn’t understand him. This vexxed him, because this was what everyone of the old people back home spoke. Didn’t they speak Italian in Italy, ferchrisake?
A very nice old gentleman came to our table and said yes, they did, indeed, but my friend was not speaking Italian, per se, he was speaking in a very old dialect from the Abruzzi which was pretty much as dead as Latin by then. He spoke it beautifully, though. The man was a professor, and he got my friend to go to his classes and demonstrate that dialect.
Don’t mix Americanisms into another language!Just after my wife and family got to Germany I went to the bakery around the corner to buy our daily bread (if it was fresh baked we NEEDED it daily)and the ladies who worked there asked me (in German, since I spoke it and it was known) how my wife was doing.
I tried to put an Americanism into German, tried to say, “She’s hanging in there”.
Didn’t work out so well. The ladies got these looks of open-mouthed horror, gasped, and chorused, “She HUNG herself”??!!
This impresssion was quickly corrected! Very quickly!
ildi
February 24, 2010 at 11:37 am
It’s weird what sticks as profanity in a language; one of the more common curses in Hungarian is ‘fene egye meg’ which figuratively means ‘damn it’ and literally means ‘may the pox eat it’ (sort of like ‘a pox on it’) and the word ‘fene’ (pox) can be interspersed in a sentence about like ‘fuck’ in English.
I was warned as a child not to talk in English about being on the bus while riding the bus; ‘basz’ means fuck in Hungarian. Euphemisms are interesting, too. Gays are called ‘sandy’ in Hungarian (homokos…) One euphemism for dick is tail, engendering jokes about leading men around by the tail.
Disclaimer: my use of slang may not be current thus marking me as terribly uncool by any Hungarian hep cats reading this blog.
Sarge: Using Americanisms turned into a way to amuse my Hungarian relatives. “Drives me up a wall” was a common one. One that I had to be careful not to use was to ask people if they were ‘enjoying themselves’; in Hungarian this is akin to asking someone if they are masturbating.
Back to the nudity thing; Hungarian TV shows scenes that would be considered soft porn here. I remember watching TV on New Year’s Eve with my extended family, and the background to a news story of whether births are more common nine months after New Years Eve was a naked couple in bed getting it on with the woman riding the man. I’ve been assimilated enough by the puritanical mentality that I felt uncomfortable watching that with all the kiddies and grandmas in the room.
About a third of the women go topless at public beaches. We were down at Lake Balaton, and my cousin’s college-age daughter was getting ready to go in the water. Her father handed her some sun screen saying, “you want to make sure you don’t burn your nipples, honey.” How many American men do you know who would be comfortable around their daughter’s nipples on public display?
Ah, nothing like a trip down memory lane…
Spanish Inquisitor
February 24, 2010 at 1:59 pm
That second one doesn’t look right. It looks like dog is a Pig! Are you dyslexic? 8)
desertscope
February 24, 2010 at 2:17 pm
If I ever get back to China, I have a feeling I will embarrass myself. My wife and I use Chinese when we don’t wish to be overheard, which may not work too well in China. Also, we occasionally use weird phrases I have made up that make no sense except in translation from English to Chinese.
mutzali
February 24, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Sarge, we travelled to Italy with my 85-year-old aunt, who learned Italian from her parents, who came to the US in 1905. What Italian I know came from my Dad, who learned from the same parents. I quickly learned that I was speaking the Italian equivalent of Victorian English. I could be understood, but got funny looks.
Chappie, as for “vaffanculo”(with the minor accent on the VA and the major accent on the CU) really MUST be accompanied by the left palm to the right antecubital area, while the right hand is raised in a fist….
Postman
February 24, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Here’s a phrase that’s probably in your books, but just in case, I think you’ll get a lot of use out of it:
Il mio hovercraft è pieno delle anguille.
Nova
February 24, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Actually “Porco cane” means “The dog is a pork”. I suspect is a sort of light version of “Porco dio” (something like “jeez” instead of “jesus”). Another common one is “Zio Cane” (“Uncle dog”).
@Postman: are you referring to the Monty Python’s sketch? Because I’ve never heard it.
(disclaimer: I am a native Italian speaker from another italian-speaking country that’s not Italy)
Larry Wallberg
February 24, 2010 at 6:34 pm
SI and Nova:
Are you dyslexic?
Well, not exactly dyslexic, but certainly overhasty at cut-and-paste.
Porco dio! Dio porco! Dio cane! Madonna Puttana!
Holy, shit!
I never heard Zio cane, but that’s a cute euphemish, kind of like when somebody in New England says “Jeepers Crow.”
Sarge
February 24, 2010 at 7:34 pm
I AM dyslexic, but enjoy a good palindrome, too. I think this year our Dyslexic’s Theater Group will present “nAnei teg yuor nug”.
Ildie, I know in Germany one of the slangs for the male generative organ is also “tail”: ie, “schwanz”. Also, some word for “sausage” seems to be another such word. Germany also boasts the slang of “Mushi” for the corresponding female counterpart. Pronounced ‘moo shee”, and from the word for “mussel” which this body part is said to resemble…references to Venus/Aphrodite and shells is in there, too, I’m told.
There is a Russian “mild” oath that my girlfriend used to use, sounds like, “Yolki-Palki” means something like “sticks of the fir tree”, our new neighbors have asked me not to say it in front of their children.
A lot of time, something that SOUNDS like profanity actually isn’t. When I was a kid there was a sergeant, the father of a classmate of mine he was in fact, Italian born and bred), would, when things went wrong, take his hat and dash it to the ground, fling his arms skyward and bellow something that sounded like, “Mahn jah pasta fah ZOOL” and shout for about a minute before calming and un-kinking that which wanted un-kinked. We all thought it was really neat cussing, said it ourselves in moments of personal turbulence, but his daughter would say, “Oh, you just think you’re so smart! That’s not cussing at all”! Of course, I now enjoy ‘pasta fagiole’ in other ways.
My wife’s supervisor grew up in the “Syrian” community here, and she told me that she and the other kids used an expression they thought was horrific, until they found out it meant “cabbage soup”.
Life and it’s disappointments…sigh….
Sarge
February 24, 2010 at 7:40 pm
I’m still trying to figure out some mild oaths my father-in-law brought back from WWI. “Name of a little blue man”…”Death of my life”…”Name of a blue cat” is how some of them translated.
A Frenchman that I know, (elderly gent) refers to me as “my old and rare”.
Cultures…cross cultures…y’all be careful out there.