{"id":1097,"date":"2015-11-07T08:49:56","date_gmt":"2015-11-07T16:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/?p=1097"},"modified":"2015-11-07T08:49:56","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T16:49:56","slug":"ricotta-ree-goat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/2015\/11\/07\/ricotta-ree-goat\/","title":{"rendered":"Ricotta \/ Ree-goat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"cukes\"<\/a>

Many Italian Americans pronounce cucumber<\/em> – “cetriolo” in the Italian dictionary – this way: ‘jadrool’<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In Fairport, New York, where I grew up, there were lots of Italian American families, and I had many Italian American friends (still do). I married an Italian American from Liverpool, New York, and have a son from this marriage who, though he is only *half* Italian American, regards himself as *almost completely* Italian American. I noticed the way my friends and my (then) in-laws and wife pronounced words for food dishes did not correspond (to my ear) to either the spelling or the pronunciations provided in my fat dictionary. Writer Dan Nosovitz of AtlasObsucra.com<\/a> explains why, in How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s do a fun experiment and take three separate linguistic trends from southern Italian dialects and combine them all to show how one Standard Italian word can be so thoroughly mangled in the U.S.<\/p>\n

First: \u201cThe features that you’ll find across a lot of these dialects, and one that you still hear a lot in southern Italy today, is vowels at the ends of words are pronounced very very softly, and usually as more of an ‘uh’ vowel,\u201d says Olivo-Shaw. D\u2019Imperio is a little more extreme, calling it \u201cvowel deletion.\u201d Basically: if the final syllable is a vowel? You can get rid of it. Vowel deletion is common amongst many languages, and is done for the same reason that, sometimes, vowels are added: to make the flow from one word to another more seamless. It’s easiest, in terms of muscle movement, to transition from a vowel to a consonant and vice versa. A vowel to a vowel is difficult; in English, that’s why we have “a” versus “an” in phrases like “a potato” or “an apple.” Some Italian words that would follow food words, like prepositions or articles, would start with a vowel, and it’s easier to just remove it so you don’t have to do the vowel-to-vowel transition.<\/p>\n

The stereotypical Italian “It’s a-me, Mario!” addition of a vowel is done for the same reason: Italian is a very fluid, musical language, and Italian speakers will try to eliminate the awkwardness of going consonant-to-consonant. So they’ll just add in a generic vowel sound\u2014”ah” or “uh”\u2014between consonants, to make it flow better.<\/p>\n

Second: \u201cA lot of the \u2018o\u2019 sounds will be, as we call it in linguistics, raised, so it’ll be pronounced more like \u2018ooh\u2019,\u201d says Olivo-Shaw. Got it: O=Ooh.<\/p>\n

And third: \u201cA lot of what we call the voiceless consonants, like a \u2018k\u2019 sound, will be pronounced as a voiced consonant,\u201d says Olivo-Shaw. This is a tricky one to explain, but basically the difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant can be felt if you place your fingers over your Adam\u2019s apple and say as short of a sound with that consonant as you can. A voiced consonant will cause a vibration, and voiceless will not. So like, when you try to just make a \u201cg\u201d sound, it\u2019ll come out as \u201cguh.\u201d But a \u201ck\u201d sound can be made without using your vocal cords at all, preventing a vibration. So \u201ck\u201d would be voiceless, and \u201cg\u201d would be voiced. Try it! It\u2019s fun.<\/p>\n

Okay so, we\u2019ve got three linguistic quirks common to most of the southern Italian ancient languages. Now try to pronounce \u201ccapicola.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cc\u201d sounds, which are really \u201ck\u201d sounds, become voiced, so they turn into \u201cg\u201d. Do the same with the \u201cp\u201d; that\u2019s a voiceless consonant, and we want voiced ones, so change that to a \u201cb\u201d. The second-to-last vowel, an \u201coh\u201d sound, gets raised, so change that to an \u201cooh.\u201d And toss out the last syllable. It\u2019s just a vowel, who needs it? Now try again.<\/p>\n

Yeah. Gabagool.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My Central New York State friends and family didn’t share the famously distinctive accents of their New Jersey brethren, but they did pronounce \u201cProsciutto\u201d like this: \u201cpruh-zhoot” (or “bruh-zhoot,” beginning with the voiced consonant).<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

P.S. – A “jadrool,” you should know, can mean moron<\/em> as well as “cucumber.”<\/a><\/p>\n

h\/t BD<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Fairport, New York, where I grew up, there were lots of Italian American families, and I had many Italian American friends (still do). I married an Italian American from Liverpool, New York, and have a son from this marriage … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[10,41,57,107],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roberts-posts","tag-accents","tag-food","tag-language","tag-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}