Some Greetings in Italian & Venetian Best Avoided

A view from more linguistically innocent times: Sandro swinging off jet lag after our arrival last November

As was the case almost a year ago, when one of the first posts I wrote was about parolaccie, our son Sandro still seems to learn most of his Italian "bad words" from a certain classmate, the son of a gondoliere. This boy has something of a school-wide reputation--one mother we know has referred to him as maleducato (rude, ill-mannered), which I think is a little severe, as he only just turned 4. I tend to think of him as a little like Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio: that is, the original rambunctious head-strong wooden scamp, not the watered-down blandly-innocent Disney version.

Not all of this kid's words are actually bad, though, some of what Sandro picks up is just a bad idea, socially-speaking. For example, before the weather here turned cold we were eating on the upper deck of a double-decker restaurant/bus parked near the beach on Lido when a pair of young brothers familiar from the playground came up and greeted Sandro.

Sandro replied glibly with: "Ciao, puzzolenti!"

The boys, so sweet to begin with, turned away, looking troubled, and walked off. My wife and I, not recognizing the word Sandro used, had no idea what happened. Sandro, quite pleased with the exchange, offered no explanation.

When we got home and looked in the dictionary, we discovered the two brothers hadn't appreciated being addressed as "stinkies" or "smellies."

Nor, as Sandro would soon realize (after ignoring our warnings), do new acquaintances take warmly to being called "brutto" (ugly) or "cattivo" (bad). Though, as I noticed the other day, Sandro's friend still addresses other kids as all of the above and--for all his boisterous charm--only really manages to pull it off with his close friends, such as Sandro, who understand him.

But by far the worst form of address Sandro has employed was entirely of his own devising. One day as we walked into the city center Sandro was in a particularly gregarious mood. We'd pass this or that woman, or pair or trio of women, and he'd happily address some greeting to her or them that we didn't catch at first. We noticed it was only women he was addressing for some reason, but didn't know why until we finally understood what he was saying:

"Ciao, cocona!" Or "Ciao, cocone!"

This was actually rather shocking.

It's a Venetian word he learned during an August of swimming and bathing and running around naked with a female Venetian friend and classmate. It's the term Venetians use with children to refer to the vagina.

It, along with its male complement, pipoto, were, along with their referents, sources of great interest and amusement to a pair of skinny-dipping three-year-olds. No surprise in that. But that Sandro should, by a curious and cunning process of induction, decide to apply (and address!) the term to women he passed on the street...!

And thus began a new discussion whose underlying theme was that as great and exciting as it is to learn and use new words, it's also important to learn the proper context in which they might be employed--productively and without offense. 

It's such an interesting phase of language acquisition, contextual ramifications such as these, for anyone--not just kids--learning a new language. Such subtleties--each word's place within a social-cultural-historical web--are reminders of why the most truly poetic works of poetry can't really be translated.  

That's one way of looking at it. Another is simply that Sandro has, in just a year, become more crudely Venetian than we ever could have expected. After all, these are the extremely blunt people who still call the little area beside one end of the Rialto Bridge where prostitutes used to congregate "Fondamenta Traghetto del Buso"--or "of the hole".

Venetian Song to the Hermit Crab (or Paguro)

We were supposed to go to Sant' Erasmo again last Sunday with friends in their boat but--and I hate to say this because of the awful heat in parts of the US--it was actually too cold. A storm came in Saturday night with high winds, rain, thunder and lightning, and the winds and colder temperatures stayed through Sunday.

I was hoping to take a photo of the hermit crabs one finds off Sant' Erasmo (and elsewhere in this area) to illustrate the following very short Venetian song which will, based upon what I witnessed on our first visit to Sant' Erasmo, coax even the shyest paguro out of its shell.

Though perhaps "coax" is not quite the right word, as the song basically makes the little crab an offer it can't refuse.

                                    Bovolo, bovolo 

                                    Vien' fora

                                    Se no 
                                    Te magno.

                                    Snail, snail

                                    Come out

                                    If you don't
                                    I will eat you.

The first two words of the song are of course familiar from the famous Scala Contarini del Bovolo staircase near Campo Manin. And the song is also sung to garden variety snails which, unlike i paguri, are actually eaten.  (My Sicilian grandmother in California would capture her garden snails, imprison them in a glass jar and feed them a steady diet of either parsley or bread for a particular length of time I've now forgotten, and then cook them up. For herself alone, as no one else would eat them. I don't recall that she ever sang to them.)

I think that pasta e paguro has a nice ring to it, but I guess when it comes to cooking a catchy name only goes so far.

In the course of looking for an illustration for this entry I found more than I was expecting when I came upon a report online that researchers in Belfast have discovered that i paguri not only feel pain but also have memory. The short article is in Italian, and here is the link, along with the image of a particularly photogenic paguro that goes with it:

http://www.100scienze.it/index.php?/archives/9-Dolore-e-memoria-nel-paguro.html

It's enough to make a guy feel guilty for singing such a bullying song to them, even if the tune itself is rather sweet and lullaby-like.

The Language Teacher

About a month ago my 3-year-old son corrected my pronunciation of a simple Italian word.

"An-chee-o," he instructed--not that I'd asked. I thought I'd said it correctly.

I tried again.

Still not quite right. He demonstrated again.

He's actually a pretty good teacher. Even last year when he was two, and after only a couple of months at an asilo nido in Piemonte, my Italian cousins said his accent was very good.  And in contrast to my Italian instructor here in the state-sponsored language course for stranieri (foreigners) he doesn't yell at you if you make a mistake.

It comes as no surprise that one's child develops a life distinct from the one he or she has with you at home, but a second language only emphasizes this. To us he has always been "Sandro". At school they call him by the name on his birth certificate, "Alessandro," or, quite often, "Ale" (Ah-lay)--a common Italian nickname we'd never heard before.

This afternoon he brought home a painted bas relief figure of a person (& tree) made of dried dough on paper enclosed within a shallow cardboard box (framing it like a children's puppet theatre) labeled "Il Folletto dell' Inverno" (or "Elf of Winter"). He just made it, so my wife and I were surprised that it was not an elf of spring--but only because we have no clue yet about this elf's story. Like La Befana, the witch of the Epiphany (whose appearance on his class's Christmas-themed calendar first struck my wife and I as some mistaken leftover from Halloween), this winter elf's appearance in our home at the end of March is a small reminder that our son is being educated in a culture not our own.

We're in the fortunate, even luxurious position of being able to accept such differences as invitations for us, as much as for Sandro, to learn something new. But it's not hard to imagine that for other parents in other places--or, of course, even here in Venice--such differences in culture and language could easily take on a more worrisome aspect. And for other kids as well.

I suspect my parents' own history of being able to speak only Italian when they started first grade in two different small towns in California had a lot to do with their unwillingness to teach any of their own kids the language. But perhaps because he started at an earlier age, in an atmosphere of mostly play, Sandro hasn’t seemed bothered by the fact that he does not—or did not—speak the same language as his classmates.

He understood Italian before he could speak it much, and now as his Italian facility increases he seems quite content to combine the languages as necessary. Though he does seem to be aware that they are two different languages with different words for the same object. So when I recently referred to a tartaruga in a pond, he responded by telling me that, no, there was no tortoise there.

This past weekend my wife was on a bus on the Lido with Sandro, his 4-year-old Italian classmate (who knows very little English), and her Italian mother. Sandro has really started to use a lot of Italian lately around his Italian friends—but not only Italian. He was telling his friend things like: “Guarda that rossa macchina” (“Look at that red car”).

And “Non si gioca with the toy cosi” (“One doesn’t play with the toy like that”).

“Ah,” my wife’s Italian friend joked to her, “Sandro speaks English like you speak Italian!”

2 Terms of Endearment Best Avoided in English

Term 1: Vecia (Venetian)

Recently Jen and I went with a friend to the funeral of her great uncle at the church of S. Zaccaria. He was the co-founder of what she claims was the first pizzeria in Venezia in the nearby campiello of S. Provolo. This is something I'll have to verify, but that's not my concern right now. Nor do I want to tell you about the mass--during which Giovanni Bellini's sublime side altarpiece was lit throughout (as opposed to the brief intervals doled out by the coin-op boxes), and the eulogy by the brother of the deceased received a hearty round of applause--but something that happened as we made our way back toward the Riva with our friend, a woman in her 30s.

Our friend knows many people in Venice, which is, after all, quite a small town, and one of them, a man of about 40, happened to pass and greeted her with "Ciao, vecia." (Pronounced something like the way an English speaker would say "vetcha.")

Our friend said ciao in return and as we walked on told us, "That's a Venetian word."

Jen said, "It sounds kind of like the Italian word that means 'old lady."

"Well, it's the Venetian version of that word," our friend told us.

"You mean he just called you an old lady!" Jen said.

"No, no, that's not what he meant. It's vecia mia--as in 'my old friend'. But we leave off mia. It's an expression of affection."

I repeated the word.

Jen turned and warned me: "Don't even think about it."

Term 2: Ciccia (Italian)

We spent 3 months last winter in Piemonte working on an organic vineyard owned by a husband and wife with two young sons. The husband often addressed his wife as "ciccia," which was not her name. We did not know much Italian and thought nothing of it--I don't think I even caught what he was saying--until a young American woman from New Jersey came to volunteer on the farm for 2 weeks.

Her father had been born and raised in Italy and from him she had acquired something very close to fluency in the language. Very close, but not exactly. Which is why one day as we were all planting young lettuce she said, with more than a little disapproval, "Have you ever noticed how X [the husband] calls his wife 'chubby' all the time?"

We had not.

"That's what ciccia means," she explained. "Actually, it's not all that nice. My father used to tell me it means something kind of like 'fat ass'".

The things we had missed at the dinner table because of our inadequate language skills! She was able to fill us in. Her father had not neglected to educate her in the full range of the Italian language.

Yet he was from the south of Italy and perhaps the usage of the same word--or at least its over- and undertones--can change from region to region.

For when I asked my cousin, an architect who lived nearby in Piemonte, about ciccia, his sense of it was nowhere near as earthy.

"Yes, ciccia," he said, "it's used a lot. It's kind of like 'dear.' It's a term of affection."

"But doesn't the word mean that you're fat?" I asked.

He thought a few moments. "Well, yes, it can mean that," he said. He pinched the skin of his waist between two fingers and said, "It can mean fleshy, yes, and to put on weight. But that meaning never occurred to me. It's just, you know, like 'dear'. It's what you call your girlfriend or your wife."

Perhaps if both of you were raised in Piemonte, for example. But for the rest of us it's probably just asking for trouble.