{"id":2843,"date":"2015-05-14T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T07:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scuolaromit.it\/articoli\/?p=523"},"modified":"2021-04-30T13:05:36","modified_gmt":"2021-04-30T11:05:36","slug":"the-musicality-of-the-italian-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scuolaromit.com\/en\/the-musicality-of-the-italian-language\/","title":{"rendered":"The musicality of the Italian language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We often here say, especially by foreigners, that <strong>Italian is characterized by an innate musicality that makes this language wonderfully pleasant to listen to<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_485\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-485\" class=\"size-large wp-image-485\" src=\"http:\/\/www.scuolaromit.com\/ene\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/04\/Maria-Callas-550x413.jpg\" alt=\"Maria Callas\" width=\"550\" height=\"413\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-485\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Maria Callas.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Many argue that our language sounds almost like a song and proves likeable and gentle.<br \/>\nThey are, of course, judgments that often stem from personal taste and are very difficult to evaluate on an objective basis.<\/p>\n<p>Opinions regarding the Italian language in the history of European and foreign culture are, in fact, too many to count: <strong>think for known example of an opinion on our native language dates back to 1388 and is of English origin<\/strong>; it is found in the prologue to the second edition of the Wycliffe Bible.<\/p>\n<p>We must consider that already in pre-Renaissance Italian was the language of the European culture and that during this period flourished the great humanists and writers who contributed to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scuolaromit.com\/en\/latin-language\/\">the affirmation of Italian from Latin<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The appreciation of Italian as a noble language, however, was achieved only in the seventeenth century. For the Englishman <strong>James Howell<\/strong>, Italian is \u201cthe best composed language in terms of fluency and smoothness\u201d. <strong>Voltaire<\/strong> spoke of the \u201cbeautiful Italian language, Latin\u2019s firstborn sibling\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The recounts of travel through Italy by the North and Central European nobility, in the time of the so-called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scuolaromit.com\/en\/rome-and-the-nineteenth-century-travellers\/\">grand tour<\/a>, are the peak moments of the glorification of Italian as a noble and musical language.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Which are the reasons that underlie such judgments?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We could start by borrowing the opinion of one of the most important Italian humanists, <strong>Piero Bembo<\/strong>, who claimed in 1525 that &#8220;two are the reasons that make beautiful every composition, gravity and pleasantness; and the things that than fill and make these two parts are three: sound, number, variation \u201c. From this point of view <strong>Italian has unique characteristics<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Gravity is mainly given by the amount of syllables and the characteristics of each in the construction of the word<\/strong>, i.e. their length in pronunciation. The modulation of the syllables in Italian is very interesting because certain words, if taken singularly, show a distinguished syllabic pronunciation from those obtained if contextualized in a sentence: this for pronunciation needs.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, one of the main reasons why this occurs is because <strong>almost all Italian words end with a vowel<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>But there is another, almost unique characteristic that distinguishes Italian from many other languages: <strong>Italian has the invaluable advantage of the use of double consonants<\/strong>. The intrinsic dance, the musicality that is often atributed to our language is probably due to this peculiarity, which creates a very interesting change in respect to the preceding vowels. Take for example the word \u201cpena\u201d (pain, punishment, \u2026): here the first vowel has a normal duration and comparable to the second one, while the \u201cn\u201d is barely perceptible, almost only a support of the language. In the word \u201cpenna\u201d (pen), on the other hand, the \u201ce\u201d undergoes a sharp contraction and the double consonant is rich, resonant, clear: pure rhythm.<\/p>\n<p>The practice of certain phonetic and poetic choices, as the <strong>elision<\/strong> &#8211; or the elimination of a letter from a word &#8211; contributes greatly to changing the length of the syllables and to creating an alternative to the monotonous rhythm of a constant repetition of similar syllables.<\/p>\n<p>This is because the elision creates the same effect of the double consonant where this cannot be used. An example is given by the famous concluding verse of <strong>L\u2019infinito by Leopardi<\/strong>: \u201ce il naufragar <strong>m\u2019\u00e8<\/strong> dolce in questo mare\u201d (and it is pleasant for me to be shipwrecked in this sea). The elisions (in bold) create a very strong rhythmic break, which affects the previous syllables.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the presence of the double consonant is not the only feature that makes our language so musical and lyrical.<strong> In poetry, in fact, examples abound with phonetic solutions and rhetoric figures, capable of altering the rhythm and cadence of the speech<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>However, it is precisely the double consonant, so common in ordinary language that fascinate the foreign listener and transmit this sweet feeling of a rhythmic dance in the Italian language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We often here say, especially by foreigners, that Italian is  [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-en"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The musicality of the Italian language &#8211; 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