"un reality" and unreality

today, the following bit of Italian headlinese came across the tubes to my RSS reader:

Napoli, presentato Vargas: "Mi sembra di essere in un reality"

the post is about a new acquisition of the soccer team in Naples, and his reaction to arriving in the city. the quote in the headline appears to be "I seem to be in a reality." this would be a decidedly odd thing to say in English — some sort of metaphysical claim.

but actually, it's just the result of a creative borrowing from English. if we were talking about reality vs. fantasy, there's no doubt that the headline would have used the word realtà or verità. (note that i have absolutely no idea what Vargas actually said; the quote is given in a different form later in the article, although still including the word reality, and it may be translated from his native Spanish.)

so what is un reality? it's a reality TV show. wordreference.com even has a separate Italian to English entry for reality indicating this. Italian has a propensity for this type of clip-and-borrow process, often taking just the attributive piece of a phrase or compound, and they turn up very frequently in headlinese, where space is at a premium. (another famous example is Italian basket for English basketball, which is more common than the native pallacanestro.)

perhaps more interesting than the morphological process here, though, is the semantic shift. Vargas' use of un reality clearly indicates that the content of un reality is anything but reality! replace reality with sogno 'dream' or fantasia 'fantasy' and the sentence means basically the same thing. of course, the blame for making a compositional phrase that can easily shift to mean the opposite probably falls more on English here, but Italian helps to obfuscate the process. i'm sure if we start using a reality to mean a fantasy in English, peevers will tell us that it's just another sign that 2012 is certainly the end of days. i guess we'll just have to wait and see what the realtà turns out to be.

short takes from the interblag

a couple quick things i noticed today on my daily catching up with the internets:

you said what now? problems with foreign parsing

i read several sites in Italian to keep up on the world of soccer. a rather strange article surfaced on one of them today. it was about the International Gay and Lesbian Football Association, which so far in the article had only been referred to by its acronym IGLFA. as i skimmed through the article, i ran across this line, describing the organization:

Iglfa, l'associazione calcistica per donne e uomini omosessuali

i did a double take when i read it, because as i read i parsed "IGLFA, the football association for [women] and [gay men]." that would be a very strange group indeed! (the fact that this association exists at all sort of baffles me, but that's a completely non-linguistic matter and i won't take it up.) of course what i should have read was "the football association for gay [women and men]." i think i wouldn't have had any problem coming up with the appropriate reading if the sentence was in English and with the word order i just gave. but the fact that the adjective, modifying the entire conjoined phrase, comes last in Italian threw me off. however my brain dealt with the construction, it automatically presumed that the first conjunct [donne] was over and done with, not to be modified any further.

more matters Italian, "after the jump"

also from the Italian blogosphere, another usage that surprised me. it's recently become common for the front page of a blog to display only the beginning of each post (although i don't employ that here on my own blog). where the short version of the post ends is up to the writer, and they often mention what else is coming after the jump, i.e. if you click through and read the rest of the post. i thought this was fairly idiomatic, but it has made its was directly into Italian, as today i read a post that said

Dopo il salto il video con tutti i gol della sesta giornata di Serie B

Brit vs. US "slang qualifies as a whole new language" trope

bizarre article over on The Beautiful Game (via Deadspin)—they can't decide who is making up these crazy soccer terms. apparently they think it's the Brits, who are doing so just to mock the Americans. no one is sure how credible it is, and the fact that calling half a dozen slang terms the MLS's "own language" is in the context of something hopefully joking means the notion isn't a total loss. oh, and some of the "lexical entries", if you will, are pretty good:

KNOCK LIKE A BEAR KISS - The phrase used to describe when a tackle is more clumsy than dangerous, and appears to be worse than it actually was.

it took me all day to figure out that the apparent word salad [knock like a bear kiss] is an NP.

*also, if you didn't get the title reference, you really should read xkcd

codeswitching envy

i've lifted this quote wholesale from the facebook wall of my Italian cousin who is coming to the US in the fall to begin his freshman year of college:

hahaha yeah man it was so cool. minchia the autista was fumating a cigaro and he had ray-ban aviators! cazzo era un grande. allora, how is it without me now?

for some reason or another, i find this so incredibly amusing. i think it might be derived from jealousy. i can only codeswitch out of Italian (because my vocabulary is so damn small), not back and forth like this person. my personal favorite is the morpheme-level switch in fumating. i gotta find a context to use that one.

this is a *postest. wait, no...

today i again had occasion to lament the fact that it's impossible to add superlative endings to nouns in English like you can in (at least some) Romance languages. so i'm sitting around on Saturday morning, watching Serie B calcio (like you do), when the Italian announcer on Rai International says:

c'era una occasionissima per la Juve!

the only way to render this in English is to say something like "that was a great chance for Juve!" something like "that was a chancest..." or even "that was the chancest..." (since English superlatives like to take definite articles) are both horrible. in lay terms, chancest is just not a word. more precisely, the rules of English morphology and in particular the features of the superlative suffix -est prohibit it from being attached to nouns.

although -est most frequently is suffixed to adjectives, it's common knowledge that not all positive adjectives mesh nicely with it. thus there are sets such as:

sweet / sweeter / sweetest
sour / *sourer / *sourest
elite / *eliter / *elitest

these two examples can rule out semantics (sweet and sour are both taste sensations) and phonetics (sweet and elite both terminate in a stressed syllable [it]) as reasons that -er and -est are prohibited here. they are some of the most fickle morphemes English has. the semantic concepts of sourer, sourest, eliter, and elitest are still representable in English, but rely on periphrasis.

sour / more sour / most sour
elite / more elite / most elite

so how well does most pair with nouns? not great. taking our chance example from above, applying most gives equally bad translations:

*that was a chancest for Juve
*that was a most chance for Juve
*that was the most chance for Juve
that was the most chance that they'll get today

the fourth and final example, with a restrictive relative clause introduced by that and modifying most chance works. its semantics are slightly different. it turns chance into a mass noun, which allows most to exert a quantificational force over it. consider the semantics of the following:

the best chance they'll get all day
the most chance they'll get all day

they are very similar, but i would say not identical. the syntax certainly teases apart when using a concrete count noun that cannot have a mass noun interpretation.

the best book i read all summer
*the most book i read all summer

[i might be able to utter the second of these sentences, given the right context and a bit of sarcasm thrown in. for example: "so you had to read War and Peace for your summer reading assignment?" "yeah, that was the most book i read all summer!" in this case, though, the most book means the longest book, not the highest quality book.]

i think i've run out of comments and written myself into a corner to boot. this is a pretty long post. but i don't think that can make it a most post or certainly not a postest. not in English at least.

a piece of pasta

today's Frazz muses on plural and singular forms of words that have been borrowed into English:


for a Bryson Elementary student, this girl has quite the knack for spotting such words, and is basing her assumption on such common pairs as cactus~cacti or syllabus~syllabi (to avoid the issue that standard English plural formation works perfectly fine with these nouns, yielding equally valid* cactuses and syllabuses). she's unfortunately made her morphological leap of faith based upon the wrong language. although ravioli looks like a Latin plural, it is—just like the food it represents—purely Italian. thus the singular should be raviolo. raviolo is actually quite well attested: 95,000 Italian Google hits and citation in Wiktionary, which is even so bold to say that raviolo is the English singular form!
*apparently the Firefox spellcheck doesn't think so, but the OED backs me up.

i already knew that words for different types of pasta inflected for singular and plural in Italian, from the first time that i heard the phrase un gnocco (which rather startled me at the time). it seems that virtually all of the food terms borrowed from Italian to English are in the plural for some reason.

uno zucchino ~ due zucchini - English zucchini/zucchini(s)
uno cannolo ~ due cannoli - English cannoli/cannoli(s)
uno gnocco ~ due gnocchi - English gnocchi/gnocchi

i only got used to using the singular forms after i had spent some time in Italy.

but what about spaghetti? the singular form exists in Italian, but is rare. but given the proper context, it can be used, such as:

c'e solo uno spaghetto sulla piata
"there's only one piece of spaghetti on the plate"

aha! there's the difference! words falling under the semantic category of pasta are count nouns in Italian, but are treated as mass nouns in English. to refer to just one piece in English, a partitive construction is required. but in Italian, a simple singular will suffice. this fact also can account for why the plural form was borrowed into English, since mass nouns almost always exhibit plural morphology. it doesn't quite explain zucchini and cannoli, which are clearly count nouns, but perhaps if spaghetti made its way over to English first, their plural forms followed simply by analogy.

the real question is if whether we had borrowed zucchino and cannolo whether we would refer to multiples of them as zucchinos and cannolos, or if we'd louse up their plural formations as we have with so many other words. if we were real sticklers for retaining native morphology we could have such fun words in English. to close, some of my favorite foreign plurals that lost out to Latinate or regular English plural formation:

hippopotamus ~ hippopotamoi
octopus ~ octopodes
prospectus ~ prospectūs

tu sai che Kobe Bryant parla italiano?

well, i sure didn't, until i was browsing the homepage of Gazzetta dello Sport this evening. near the bottom of the page was a link to a video interview entitled Kobe Bryant si confessa (in italiano). i presumed that the interview must have been done through an interpreter, or that Bryant's answers were dubbed over.

i was quickly proved wrong. it turns out that Bryant is in fact a decently fluent speaker of Italian, since he spent a good chunk of his childhood there while his father played in the Italian top-level basketball league. Kobe hasn't had a whole lot of occasions to speak Italian since his family moved back to the US when he was in high school, so he was, as he predicted at the start of the interview, a bit rusty. as the questioning wears on he is more and more tempted to codeswitch, and he exhibits some interesting phenomena which people who are interested in such things should definitely take a look at. most noticeable are his variations when using proper names. whenever he utters a name in isolation in an otherwise Italian sentence, he pronounces it with what could loosely be termed an "Italian accent." breaking it down phonologically, what he's really doing is using only the vowel quantities present in Italian to approximate the English pronunciations. but when he begins to list several American names, the Italian phonetics slowly drop away, and furthermore if he drops all the way back to the American pronunciation, he tends to speak in English when he continues, resuming Italian at the beginning of his next sentence.

Bryant follows good precedent, as far as i know. i've only heard one other American basketball player talk about the game in Italian. last spring, SportItalia had Dan Peterson, an American who coached for many years in the Italian league, doing commentary for the NCAA tournament. his color commentary was peppered with English, much like Bryant's. his most noticeable tendency was to start his Italian sentences with "well..." other than that, his codeswitching ability led to the creation of a new catchphrase: if you don't like the call that was made, just yell "hey, arbitro!"