Who in his right mind

misses Georgia? (Pace Wm. Nelson.) Notwithstanding: this linguistic isolation is killing me. It was easier in Africa, where I couldn't even TRY to speak the language, and simply gave myself over to books and solitude. But solitude in Rome, like anywhere magical, is a dish of parsley and salt, of water and sand. A double negation: restricted to small talk and that incompetently. The only people who have time for small talk are gods and ghosts. And to imagine a language is to imagine a life-form. So with a 1000-word vocabulary and a tongue lacerated with conjugations and declinations, I'm the ghost of an idiot.

La parlata è come la faccia: la nostra caratteristica più ovvia, di cui siamo il meno consci.

WiFi Thievery

Oh this confounded thing. I've had it. I'm getting a cellphone before I come back -- a cellular pocket cock. This hunting around the city for unsecured wifi signals to poach is absurd. I've wandered for miles, followed directions off the web for a free hotspot here or there, hung upside down from trees, stood on top of Hadrian's column. I signed up at the local Comintern office for a free account that doesn't work in the public parks. I found an unlocked office signal to poach near the local metro station, but they got wise of me after a few days and locked it. So I leave the blasted wifi turned on while walking home and lo, it appears that there are two unsecured signals right outside the door of my apartment. Or were, at any rate, at noon. But the wind's shifted direction since then, so we'll see.

American Erbs

For some reason I've been remembering a joke my British friend Phil told me "You know how American and English pronunciation often differ ..." he started.
"Sure, Phil."
"You know, then, how Yanks say Erb but Britons say Herb, aspirating the H."
"Sure."
"Well, do you know WHY Britons pronounce the word that way?"
"No, why?"
"Because it's got a fucking H in it."

Lingua impestata

Italian. It's certainly got its prepositions, and which are notoriously variable: you can be in a store but you have to be at a bank and under a car repair place and who knows what. You walk at foot and ride in a bike. But can we use any of these broken-down old prepositions to indicate who gives what to whom? Oh NO, that'd be too easy. We have to 1 use inflected pronouns which 2 change their spelling when they combine and 3 are often truncated and 4 have to agree with the number and gender of the participle ending -- but only in the third person, and only with certain verbs. So to say "I gave it to her" you WOULD have to say "To her it I have given" (because they use the compound imperfect as their standard past tense, and call the regular old preterite past the "passato remoto" and don't use it -- so you can't say "I went" -- you have to say "I have gone," which means "I went") -- which would be, at any rate, "Le la ho dato," but Le becomes Gli and adds an E and combines with la (we're assuming what I gave her was feminine, like, say, a bus) AND it contracts AND the participle changes to agree with the bus, so you end up with "Gliel'ho data." Which is a lot of fucking work for a simple present indicative sentence with a couple of pronouns.

And that's just the pronouns. The verbs are all inflected, so it's madness Haven't these fucking Romans ever heard of a goddamn modal? I know, I know, all the Romance languages are like that, and that English has its share. But English's share of ending-changes is tiny. What, third person singular present indicative? I drive he drives? -- and one more change from present to past, drive-drove? Yeah, but that's it. This fucking language has to change six times per tense, times maybe another five tenses that all have their own unique sets of endings. All of which are subject, naturally, to a large set of irregularities and various spelling changes to preserve hard and soft sounds across the plethora of various endings that stems can take on.

And that's just the grammar. The lexicon is its own madness. Since this impoverished language has half as many words as English, there are about sixteen different English senses for every one Italian expression. Which is partly why the prepositions are so crazy for English speakers: they rely on different prepositions to inflect a given word in different directions.

Then there's the subjunctive, which allegedly represents a whole other category of proposition-force -- call it the that-I-walk rather than the I-walk -- that doesn't exist in English because it serves no purpose: while you can say "You walked," you have to say "I'm glad you walkebbered." Because being glad about something obviously necessitates an entirely separate dependent verb system. With 24 different endings, of course (2 number x 3 persons x 4 tenses).

And to top it all off, no one speaks Italian. Even today, regional dialects, which can differ dramatically from "standard" (originally Florentine) Italian, are widely spoken. And we're talking major syntactic variations, not just pronunciation.

So simply trying to buy bread is like living through that scene in Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" when the Centurion is correcting the grammar of Brian's graffiti. "A! No, E! No, I! Plural, genetive, third declension! RomanI ..."

On the other hand, the nice thing about Italian is that about 80% of the lexicon has an English congnate, so if you can get the hang of where to add an O and where a ZIONE you're in good shape.

When in Rome: news from the language tourist

Dateline: Viale Regina Margherita, Policlinico Metro, Roma. Case in point regarding this pestilent tongue: The Article. English has four: one definite (the) and three indefinite (a an some). Italian has about twelve, the use of which depends on number, gender, adjacent vowels, the sense of the phrase, idiomatic exceptions and the phase of the moon. But the pronouns are worse: they have all of the aforementioned peculiarities, plus they behave like subatomic particles, unpredictably changing when placed too close together and projecting their properties across whole sentences to change the spelling of perfectly innocent bystanding words. Now I understand why Italians gesture so much when they talk: you have to gesture when you talk to make what the hell you're trying to say clear, because the sentences are all like "to him for her some of it right out there already I put" -- except with no prepositions, so it ends up looking like "Io gli ci l'ha i lei le ne gia è put." And if you change the l'ha to l'ho you've just told someone to fuck their dead ancestors. Which in fact in the Romano dialect is "li mortacci tua," so don't say that, because it's really not very polite. But you CAN say that something (or someone) is SQUILIBRATO, which is a very entertaining word for squirrelly, deranged, nuts.