Or to mix with Scotch!

Incidentally, "la pasta" (feminine noun) in Italian is pasta or pastry (as described above), but "il pasto" (masculine noun) means the meal -- breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

LOL dfmom! Or there is the ever popular Coke for all carbonated beverages no matter what "flavor", which is what I grew up with.

oneillchris

I am not claiming extreme expertise, but I am pretty sure that the shortened, clipped vowel ending of Italian words is part of several southern dialects, and that it seems to have gotten more pronounced with immigration to the US.

I have traveled in Italy with my mother, who is completely fluent and Italians often tell her, in Italian of course, that they can tell where she is from in Italy by her pronounced accent, which drops the vowels sounds, especially when there are mulitiple vowel sounds, at the end of many Italian words.

This has also been discussed on this forum since I've been around.

My mother is always shocked to find, and completely reluctant to admit, that she is mispronouncing an Italian word. After all, she has spoken Italian for 81 years. The same thing happened when we traveled in Italy with our neighbors. The husband grew up speaking Italian, but was schooled in English. He had a very difficult time understanding that he was speaking a strong dialect that was removed from modern Italian. And he had trouble matching written words to words he had pronounced with dropped or clipped ending vowels.

Finally, friends could not find there grandmother's village on a map, because she had clipped off the final vowels in its name, and no one knew exactly which place she had come from.

I'm guessing that the Galluccio that you found is very likely the Gaa Loosh that was spoken of.

Finally, there are more people than I care to count who will argue that the rolled meat cooked in sauce they enjoyed so much can't possibly be spelled braciole, and pronounced
bra chee o lay because they always heard it called Bra zhooL.

This all makes perfect sense to me, who enjoyed migration theory during linguistics classes, but I can't convince my mother. She thinks the entire nation of Italy is mispronouncing words that she says correctly!

Hi Tuscanlifeedit, I was interested in your post as it brought back memories. I went to HS in a small town and about 50% of the population was originally from Italy, basically southern Italy. The children of these immigrants (my age group) to this day speak Italian. However LOL, when my friends from Northern Italy hear them talk in "Italian" they just shake their heads as they can hardly understand them. First of all the Italian they speak is dialect Italian. And they really drop their vowels at the end of words. And a lot of dishes have ended up being called a made up version of Italian but not even the version their parents or grandparents used.

And one of the biggest arguements I ever heard between all these great people is whether the sauce for the pasta is called sauce or gravy. Both English words of course. It was too funny.

Well when I started this post I had never imagined the response, so pasta can be pastry or pasta or meals, like pasti compriso (meals included).

I have been a wanta be Italian my whole life, growing up anglophone and Catholic in Montreal, I had no choice.

I am irish but I have no actual identification with Ireland, My friends, my wife, our culture is 100% italian right down to my annual wine making.

Its not that the irish have no culture but it was never as fascinating as having pastafagioli for lunch, or the surplus of food found in my friends cold rooms, unheard of in an irish family.

Viva Italia

No "pastO" is meal. It's "pastA" that can be pasta or pastry or dough.

Here's a whole gigantic thread on the "sauce" vs. "gravy" issue: http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum....tag=ab-italian (Starting with message #18 there's a survey, trying to correlate people's answers with the place where they grew up and the region of Italy their ancestors came from.)

Ineillchris, No be Irish, it's as wonderful as my Itaian parents. Read My friend Ger's reports, a beautiful writing, interesting lady from Ireland who travels all over Europe and always returns to home or compares where she is to Ireland.

Actually, Cigalechanta, I think Ger lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. I seem to recall her mentioning it in a post about either places to retire or places to spend winter (Vancouver Island has a very mild one).

I find it surprising that in this thread that has veered a bit in the direction of linguistics, nobody has mentioned the real root meaning of "pasta": it means "paste". That's why it's the word for dough, which has a pasty texture.

"pasta" in Italian is the same word as "pâte" in French, where the circumflex accent over the a represents a missing "s" (just as "hôte" means host, and "fête" means fest[ival]).

At the end of a two-week vacation in Italy some time ago, my wife asked a hotel manager where we could have a meal without pasta. I think he was shocked.

tuscanlifeedit, if your mother drops some final vowels, what does she do with the word "cuoiaio" (leather worker), which ends in six vowels?

- Larry

Eloise: You're right about where she lives, but she is originally from Ireland and mentions Ireland a lot when telling her impressions of other places.

Justretired: I think we knew that (or most of us did), but it just didn't come up in the "conversation."

Larry (just retired)

My mother has yet needed to pronounce the word "cuoiaio" and I think this is because, according to her tales of poverty in the deep south, leather was Christmas dinner. ;-(

Seriously, based on similar pronounciations I have heard from other immigrants, and my mother, "coo yo" might be how it would possibly come out. Just guessing, though.

My grandparents came here from Sicily and my aunt would always have us over for 'pasta sugo' on Sundays. Sicilian sauce never had meat in it except on special occasions. And tuscanlifeedit is correct about southern Italians dropping the end vowels-- we never ate ricotta cheese, it was 'ricot'. The Italian people who lived next door to my grandparents here in the midwest could barely understand their Sicilian dialect.

Angela_m ... ricotta in my house was always ricot as well, although - pronounced with almost a 'g' in the the middle. Also - manigot - as opposed to manicotti. (I can't even order it in a restaurant because no one understands what I'm asking for and I feel silly asking for mannnicotttti.

I don't really think the final vowel is usually dropped in Sicilian, or at least I didn't hear that in Sicily when I overheard people speaking dialect. The words are different (but usually somewhat similar) in Sicilian, and generally there's a different final vowel in masculine words: U instead of O. In mainland southern Italy, e.g. Naples, I think it is common for the sound of the word to be truncated, losing the final vowel. I'm not positive whether this happens strictly in the actual dialects or in the regional/local pronunications of Italian itself. In places like NYC there developed almost a generic southern immigrant way of speaking that was understood by people from various regions. Maybe that's why some Sicilian families adopted that pronunication with the final vowel dropped, but I don't think it's becaue
Sicilian itself does not have the final vowel.

cmt, your last posting was fascinating.

Here's an interesting site (in Italian), all about Italian dialects:

http://www.dialettando.com/

It includes an on-line dictionary that lets you look up words in 22 Italian dialects, or translate an Italian word into dialect.

- Larry

Clearly, "rə-goat" and "mah-nə-goat" are preferred pronunciations in "the Soprano household".

What were those little vertical rectangles supposed to be (as in r+rectangle-g+o+a+t)?