Only talking Italian will do on Venice market stalls
Critics have branded the move racist but councillors insist it is needed to save struggling markets from closure amid chronic population decline
Venetians don’t speak Italian, they speak Veneto.
This being a truth of most of Italy. The only people who really speak Italian are the Florentines – because that’s the variant of the Romance languages which was chosen to be “Italian”.
This is why Italian is so easy to learn as a language. For you don’t need to learn it very well – it’s a second language for pretty much everyone else too.
Racist has just become the nastiest swear word that the anointed can use in polite company. It’s lost all meaning. So anything that anyone really doesn’t like or just if they suddenly want to feel virtuous they wheel out the R word.
Don’t like Islam? Don’t want to have to obey Sharia Law? You racist! Only want Italian spoken in Italy? You racist! Want to protect British borders? You racist! Want to protect Ukraine’s borders? Good boy! You’re the Coalition of the Willing!
LOL
My late missus spoke Italian with a posh Milanese accent. Waiters ( who are all from the south ) would snap to attention in her presence. She said that Sicilian and Venetian were indecipherable to her.
I think ( long time since I looked at this ) that Italian like what she is spoke is really Piedmontese.
One thing she liked to say was :
“You British, you all make fun about Mussolini but he did something very important. He made the Italians learn how to speak Italian.”
Sounds like a great suggestion.
As well this and trebling its tourist tax (10x for day trippers) Venice ought to clear out all the illegals selling tat, who infest most of its popular streets.
“Commerce is in decline as the population of Venice’s historic centre has shrunk to less than 50,000 and is dwarfed by the 30 million annual tourists. Visitors add little to the local economy, and soaring rents and overcrowding are driving residents to the mainland.”
What the fuck else are you going to do with Venice, other than it be a tourist place? And how is people paying for hotel rooms and dinner and tourist tat not part of the “local economy”?
Getting around by boat in a city was probably not a bad idea 500 years ago, when the alternative was a horse, but it’s a ridiculous place now. You’re not going to set up the offices of a tech company or a factory where you have to worry about humidity, rot, and moving things by little boats. So tourist shit makes more sense.
It’s like complaining that Bourton-on-the-Water is no longer ironmongers and greengrocers. It’s a pretty place. The locals can easily drive to Tesco in Moreton-in-Marsh. So, you turn it into a place selling overpriced tat to coach loads of people as that is more profitable than selling lettuces.
“Was”, is the word you’re looking for.
The distinctiveness of each regions dialect/language has massively diminished after decades of TV and other forms of entertainment. Now, except amongst the 60+ it is mostly just an accent. Which, I acknowledge can be equally incomprehensible. Scouse and Dundonian, I’m looking at you.
So you’re telling us that the cafés in Venice charging €25 for an espresso aren’t making money?
Tourists add little value to Venice? Fuck off. I was there once about 35 years ago, and 3 coffees in St Marks’ Square cost £60 (pounds, not lire!). I went there with my wife and kids a couple of years later, told her the story, and she said “Let’s have a drink, then”. So it was 2 coffees for us and 2 ice creams for the kids, and it was £80. “Christ!” she exclaimed. I still use it every time she accuses me of not listening – she wasn’t on that day.
You may be right that Florentine is the real Italian, but my experience suggests otherwise. They pronounce ‘c’ nasally, as in “Mia Hasa” for “Mia casa”. It’s a very pronounced effect. Frequent visitors note different dialects all over the place. I suppose that it’s one of the reasons they don’t mind Brits’ mispronunciation – it could just be a different regional dialect. It’s so different to the fucking Frogs who demand perfect diction or they won’t pay attention. Not only that, but the Eyties give you all manner of discounts for even trying. Love ’em.
” it could just be a different regional dialect.”
Yes, that’s the point. And those dialects vary enormously – even different root Romance languages at times. The Florentine dialect is what was chosen to be “Italian” the national language. Most Italians don’t, in fact, speak that. Not in daily life.
When we arrived in the Cambridge area there were still a few old folk who spoke in the former local accent. I found it easy to understand them – maybe it was an effect of having been in the Danelaw centuries ago.
The Young spoke sub-London and were difficult to follow. I dare say by now they speak a blend of sub-London and sub-American. Nothing that a few machine gunners couldn’t cure.
Written, not spoken, florentine was chosen as the national language
De Gaulle homogenised French. (As well as forbidding schoolkids to write with their left hand.)
There are still a few old buffers in the Alps who promote Savoyard in a hopeless cause.
Ar vie! (if that’s how it’s spelt.)
The grannie of a friend of ours spoke Occitan, learnt French at school, and spoke French for most of her life. When she got very old, though, she found French more and more difficult and reverted to Occitan.
To whom, I wonder, did she speak it? Her granddaughter understands it only imperfectly. Maybe other old people nearby coped well with it.
That’s going to be a bit like trying to communicate with our “carers”, everyone.
@dearieme
I have friends in the SW speak Occitan at home. It’s not dying out just yet.
Venetian is a dialect of Italian – much as lowland Scots (Lallans) and Geordie are of English.
@Theo: no, English and Lallans are dialects of Old English, the rather absurd name used for the language of the Anglo-Saxons. English is descended via Mercian, Lallans via Northumbrian.
Theo, Italian is a geographically central meltingpotolect of its surrounding multiple languages. It is a delayed rerun of the phenomenon of the Yookay lingua-thaemsa-English-with-cute-accents-the-BBC-likes-to-play-with situation. Modern Italian arose from the necessity of common intelligibility in a new nation state. It’s where English was 1000 years ago, including the bits about the warring neighbouring tribes bringing vocab in, but no equivalent to the Normans coming in establishing a new ruling class.
Living in that part of Italy where lots and lots of words end in consonants, to the point they are on road signs (a near-taboo in other forms of Italian), some formal knowledge of the language proved to be almost useless. Going a few miles cross the border to that part of Switzerland that speaks “!talian”, and makes living in formerly referred-to part of Italy somewhat tolerable? Much. Much. Easier. Why? Who knows. Some sane Fiorentini got out (or were thrown out) and went to Ticino 400 years ago, perhaps.
Mr Womby,
It depends what you mean by “the cafes”.
Someone is making money for sure.
It may not be the person you think is making the money under an unencumbered anglosphere concept of free market capitalism.
BiG
You mean they’re gonna make me a cappuccino I can’t refuse?
English is descended via Mercian, Lallans via Northumbrian.
However circuitous their descent, Lallans and Geordie are still dialects of English, just as Venetian is a frenchified dialect of Italian.
Frenchified? It’s got a lot more Germanic in it…..Lombards etc.
“Lallans and Geordie are still dialects of English” – I wonder if cause and effect have been swapped round here. If media and travel and universities (both of them, ha ha) leads to centralisation of language then surely the common language in the UK would derive from a merger of what the alpha males of Lalla and Geordieland and Manc speak when they meet for merriment. Not the other way around.
“However circuitous their descent, Lallans and Geordie are still dialects of English”
No. In fact according the old semi-jocular rule that a language is a dialect with an army and law courts of its own, Geordie is a dialect of Scots, or was until 1707 because both came from Northumbrian but Geordie didn’t have its own army and courts.
Another view is to say that English came into being in the years after 1066 as a creole developing from Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. Scots never had such a huge slug of Norman French but does contain more Norse influences than English. So you could say that English is a Frenchified dialect of Scots.
It’s so different to the fucking Frogs who demand perfect diction or they won’t pay attention.
In Paris, perhaps, but as others have pointed out, there are (despite De Gaulle’s attempts to unify the language) plenty of local dialects (and even languages) in areas of France. Those from the Languedoc still pronounce “une boîte d’allumettes” with three more syllables than a Parisian would.