The Best Australian Essays 2017 by Anna Goldsworthy

Author:Anna Goldsworthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

A Short History of the Italian Language

Moreno Giovannoni

Morè.

Morè.

Only an Italian can say that properly and there’s only one person left who calls me that. The rest are dead.

The first words I ever heard were Italian ones. The first word I ever spoke was an Italian word – papà. This was according to my poor mum, who stopped speaking Italian when her vocal cords froze, together with the rest of her, in a nursing home bed, a few weeks before she died. We sat with her and exchanged the occasional Italian word. We spoke Italian words to her even though we didn’t know if she could understand.

For the first three years of my life my only language was Italian. In the village where I was born Italian was in the air and the language went in through your soft baby skin and one day it came out your mouth, so you had no choice but to speak Italian.

Then they took me to Australia, where I spoke English with the Australians and Italian with my mother and father. This was the same Italian that the Australians used to call Eye-talian and the people who spoke it Eye-talians (and Eye-ties for short).

I became very good at English. I was the best speller in my class, probably in the world, and the best writer in the class. I was better at English than the Australian kids were. But in prep I struggled.

One day, at the age of four and a half, I came home from school distraught because I didn’t know how to spell ‘cheese’. I had written c-h-e-s-s. Cheese.

Another difficult word was ‘banana’. I didn’t know when to stop. I wrote bana-nana-nana- …

I asked my mother, who said it was the same as in Italian – banana – and she wrote it down for me. I thought it was a trick. How could you turn one language into another and the spelling be the same? Then I realised that what my mother had done was not just a simple trick, it was a magic trick. Italian was powerful. She had translated a word. I realised that if I could harness the power of the Italian language it could solve all my Australian word problems. On that day I became a translator. For the rest of my life I knew I would be able to say things in two languages. I knew there was more than one way of saying the same thing. The world was suddenly much bigger, richer and more complex than the Australian monolinguals realised. It gave me such confidence that ‘cheese’ and ‘banana’ were the only words I ever misspelled.

*

When my brother was born I waited for him to start speaking. Would he speak English or Italian? At first he didn’t speak at all. He just cried and cried so I shoved chunks of parmesan inside his little toothless mouth, because he was obviously hungry, but this upset my mother a lot. Sadly, my brother, when he did finally start, spoke English.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.