Sheela Clary

I’ve decided to write about something fun and charming and beautiful, something I know so well I could explain in my sleep.

I know Italian. Note that I do not claim to be “fluent,” because I have no interest in being waylaid by a native speaker on the street and interrogated about Fellini or something. I’m really no expert. I’ve taught the language on and off, both one-on-one and in groups of varying levels, for about two decades. But I am not of Italian origin. My parents didn’t take me there as a child. My mom didn’t even cook pasta much. I just love it, that’s all. I fell in love as a freshman in college, and deepened the love affair living and teaching in Milan, and while I wish I could claim a more original fascination, with, say, underwater cave diving, or taxidermy, what can I say? I love Italian. I love the language, and food, and people, and life.

Speaking Italian is an interesting superpower that, sfortunatamente*, rarely comes in handy (see here for evidence of my failure to put it to good purpose in the NY Times Spelling Bee). But for those of us ready at long last to turn our minds toward travel in greener pastures, who, like me, spend our work breaks looking up things like the hours of the Etruscan museum in Cortona for next June, I thought I’d offer a free Italian lesson. Prego. (You’re welcome.)

Lezione #1: La pronuncia della pasta

I’m going to teach you a couple of the most important differences in English and Italian pronunciation by showing you how to say a few different pasta shapes, starting what I consider the most cringey, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard example. I am doing this so that you can avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on Italian-sensitive ears by pronouncing a hard “g” where a soft one belongs. This is a public service I’m performing in the interest of making the world a better place. Prego.

Anyone who reads this will henceforth have zero excuse for pronouncing “tagliatelle” like “tag-li-a-tell.” Here’s the rule: in Italian, “gl” together is very lovely and gentle sounding. It does not sound at all like a drill bit in the brain. It sounds, to be more specific, like the sweet double L in our word “brilliant.” Try saying that word. Brilliant. Feel your tongue on the top of your palette as you hit the double L? That’s what you are going for with “tagliatelle.”

Also relevant here, each and every syllable in Italian is pronounced separately. So we, uninitiated Americans, say “tagliatelle” like “tag-li-a-tell,” with only four syllables. The correct way to say it is with five syllables, as in, again, not forgetting that double L as in brilliant sound, “Ta-gli-a-tel-le.” Try it again. There you go! Well done! Bravo/Brava! (In Italian, as in Spanish, gender is assigned to nouns and to the adjectives that must agree with them; “o” is the masculine ending and “a” is the feminine.)

After the crucial tagliatelle lesson, I also don’t expect to hear any of you football fans butchering the name of former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, you hear me? That poor man’s Wikipedia page should include a pronunciation key. How do we say the name Tagliabue, amici? That’s right. Five syllables, once again, and don’t forget, soft “g,” not hard, like the double L in brilliant. “Ta-gli-a-bu-ay.” Isn’t that better? (Yes, I know nobody says it right, not even the man himself, I imagine, but IMHO you really don’t have any business attaching yourself to a gorgeous name like Tagliabue if you’re just going to murder it.)

Generally speaking, if stuck between two ways to pronounce an Italian word, always choose the more musical and lyrical and beautiful-sounding. “Taglia,” which means “cut,” when said correctly, is a very pretty Italian word, although there are hundreds of others, too. As a teacher, I was forever exclaiming to my students, “Stracciatella is my FAVORITE word!” and they were forever reminding me, “You said that last week about farfalle!”

(FYI: “Stracciatella” means little thread, or little rag, and it refers to both an egg drop soup and chocolate chip ice cream. No, I have no idea why it means both. Do you think I made up this language? I’m just the messenger.)

Now, let’s take a tour of the pasta shelves at Price Chopper, shall we?

What have we here … ah, “gemelli,” which means “twins.” The “g” here is also soft, because it’s followed by an “e.” It’s pronounced in Italian just as we’d say it in English. “G” followed by “a” or “o” or “u” is hard, as in “gamba” (leg), “gomito” (elbow) and “Gubbio” (cute town in Umbria.)

(Spanish-speakers take special note, because you always want to make the “g” in “gemelli” silent. It’s not. There are no silent letters to trip you up in Italian, as there are in Spanish and French and Portuguese. This is why Italian is so much better.)

Here’s another of my favorites, a pasta shape that’s particularly adapted to a rich Bolognese ragu sauce; “garganelli,” which are a quill-shaped, hollow pasta local to the Emilia-Romagna region. “Garganelli” means “little gorgons.” Just kidding. I don’t think it means anything, actually. Probably some chef in Bologna thought it sounded nice.

I wasn’t kidding about the “little,” though. For my money, the most charming and fun words to learn in Italian are the diminutives and the augmentatives. “Ello/elli” and “ino/ini” are diminutive suffixes, which means they take a thing and make it smaller. So, “limoncello” means “little lemon,” and “stracciatella” means “little straccia,” or, as I indicated above, “little thread, little rag.”

My favorite augmentative, in fact the only one I am aware of, is “-one.” I learned this suffix from a 5-year-old boy with enormously bushy eyebrows who was mouthing off to his mom in a restaurant in Bormio. She scolded him, and when she got up from the table, he muttered after her, “Culone.” This means “fat ass,” “culo” (ass) + “one” (big). (It sounds funnier if you remember that the word “culone” would have three syllables.) But getting back to pasta, you’re probably more familiar with the augmentative “cannelloni,” which is made up of “cannello” plus “-oni.” Cannelloni are “big tubes.”

There are more pasta diminutives, like “fettucine,” where the root word “fettucce” means “ribbons” before adding the diminutive “-ine” at the end, making “fettucine” mean “little ribbons.” (Isn’t that cute?) This construction also brings us “linguine” which is “lingua” (tongue) with “ine,” and so, “little tongues.” (That one’s not so cute, which, come to think of it, is probably why I don’t care for linguine.)

I’ll leave today’s lesson with just one other pronunciation tip, because I’ve learned that you don’t want to bite off too much when it comes to language learning. “Ch” does not sound like our “ch,” it sounds like “k.” So, my third most favorite pasta shape, “conchiglie,” is not pronounced “con-chig-lee.” (I actually twitched involuntarily typing that.)

Remember that “ch” sounds like “k,” and remember that “gl” sounds like the double L in brilliant, and you, too, can successfully produce: “con-key-gli-ay.” (Conch shells.) I have a feeling I’m going to have to review this one again. That’s ok. We didn’t learn English words by hearing them once, did we?

*Bonus lezione

Sfortunatamente = Unfortunately. To make an adverb in English, we add “ly” to an adjective. The Italians add “-mente.” Also interesting to note here is the use of “s” to create the opposite of the root word. So, “fortunata,” means fortunate, or lucky, and “sfortunata” means its opposite, or unlucky. This is very handy Italian word to know, it turns out, because they’re a very superstitious people. (Once I was in a car with an Italian driver, and rather than proceed on the road over which a black cat had just walked, he backed up and found an alternate route, longer by several miles.)

Other examples of the “s” antonym phenomenon include “vantaggio” and “svantaggio” (advantage and disadvantage) and “caricare” and “scaricare” (load and unload).

Well, that was fun. Maybe next time I’ll teach you a list of curses, since you already have the root curse (see little boy’s insult above) that’s the foundation for everybody’s favorite Italian insult, which, if you’ve ever driven a car in Italy, or intend to do so in the future, you are guaranteed to have hurled in your direction.

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