Posted on 03/16/2021 5:30:13 PM PDT by nickcarraway
New Jersey is a wonderfully diverse place. Though a relatively small state, it has the highest population density in the U.S. It's also brimming with an immense amount of Italian-American residents.
I'm half-Italian, but I didn't grow up speaking a lick of the mellifluous tongue. From pizza and pasta to "The Sopranos," I was raised in a place where the notion of Italy is celebrated. However, it took me some time to note that this was not Italian culture, per se, but a slightly different "sect" altogether — an Italian-American history and culture that's rich in and of itself.
It wasn't until culinary school that I began to embrace all that the Italian-American experience has to offer, which is so much more than chicken parm. From bolognese and gnocchi to caponata and fennel, the breadth of Italian-American cuisine began to come into full view, and I've been eager to learn and consume as much as possible about the storied culture's food and history ever since. (It also didn't hurt that I have a killer Italian accent.)
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
The southern regions were occupied by Spain for a long time, beginning sometime in the nineteenth century. Since it was the dominant culture at the time, the people copied the Spanish way of saying the Italian words, many of which had close equivalents in Spanish.
The people were so much more isolated than they are today, in villages, so every area developed its own dialect.
This was definitely not something that started her in the U.S. I remember when people came from Italy, they spoke the same way.
There is also the word lu for il (the) in Calabrian Italian dialects.
I lived in Valenzuela where Spanish is spoken, not Italian.
“How calamari became galamar and ricotta became rigott.”
Calamari is calamari and ricotta is ricotta. This thread confuses me.
I think it's a beautiful Romance language such as...
"...Mangia merda e muori..."
You're acting like an American!
You drink whiskey and soda;
You're doing rock and roll dancing;
You play baseball:
You smoke Camels,
But you were born in Italy!
Pronto!
Tu Vuò Fà L'americano, which I posted in #24, is sung in a Neapolitan accent, whose pronunciation seems to be close to Spanish. A friend of mine who was fluent in Spanish told me that when he was stationed in Naples during his hitch in the Navy, he could converse with the locals using Spanish. However, when he traveled to Rome, he could not understand the Roman dialect.
Sloth.
Stopped reading right there. It's a sh-t hole of epic proportions. Unfortunately I had to go there to see my aging mother!
H.L. Mencken addressed this in 1919 in his marvelous book, “The American Language.”
I wonder about the first guy that grabbed the tentacle of a dead squid and said to himself “I’m gonna eat that”....
Capicola.
South jersey has great Italian food 🥘. Cape May county in particular
Philly influence. Philly has the BEST MANGIA Hands down-a !
Capisce?
Or just mutz for short. MutzaRELL! With the last syllable emphasized and the “r” pronounced with a trilling R sound that is curtailed so as to to sound like a single “d” as you’ve pointed out. Very funny, this state. Quirky. It has personality, that’s for sure.
I hope gr8eman will remember. Jersey men don’t need him around anyhow!
Ditto for the wife. “Kitchen Sicilian” is what she called what they spoke. She can’t speak it, but understands it. We visited her relatives in Sicily and they started speaking Italian. Her cousin had to tell them to speak Sicilian so that she could understand
Me - I speak Spanish and had. A hard time with both Italian and Sicilian..
Anyone else watch the “pasta grammar” youtube channel?
This is one of their first videos, about the rules of pasta:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTqvM1h7WhI
I’ve seen it in Italy and in America. Different places have different dialects (regions, cities, towns, etc). I like to joke that even households have a different dialect.
If you mean what word it originated from, that would be capicola, a traditional cold cut from Naples. The "gabbagool" pronunciation is Sicilian-American dialect.
Other languages have other words! The seafood culture of the Italian peninnsula predated the U.S. by many centuries. Calamari is the Italian word for a specific kind of squid. One of the roots in the word is "mar", which means "sea."
Fresh calamari, before slicing and cooking:
LOL!
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