My Italian dictionary...

...or, more accurately, my dictionary of the Italian language rests back up open to page 748 on the table of my apartment in Alghero, Sardinia. The newly purchased reference is yellow and black as a vespa, stretched out like some disconcertingly jaundiced foreign tourist lying on a Mediterranean beach.

And when I write yellow as a vespa, I mean as vespa - “wasp”, not Vespa, the scooter, which was apparently named after vespa the wasp. Oddly enough, in spite of it having been named after a wasp, I have never seen a yellow and black Vespa. Many are white, as though they are wasps with some rare pigmental disorder.

This dictionary is so excellent. Sort of a travel size reference (if you are in the habit of travelling with a streamer trunk.)

But I digress, which I have noted numerous times in my life, is a serious and potentially debilitating occupational hazard when dealing with foreign language dictionaries. And when I use foreign, I mean to me, as is the case with this dizionario Italiano, which is not a language foreign to some 80 million people from Switzerland to Rome and Sicily to Eritrea.

The Istanbullu Orhan Pamuk wrote a foreword to the Turkish language translation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. In Pamuk’s essay explaining his foreword (published in the book Other Colours) , Pamuk argues the very subject of Tristram Shandy is digression.

I hear you, dude.

When not distracted or digressing, I am always wary of the word foreign, as I am with the label ethnic (as a very smart musician once said “all music can be described as ethnic…it’s just that you aren’t necessarily aware of your own ethnicity). On that same tack, while charting the Sea of Foreign Languages, I am tempted to re-name my newly-minted marine landmark as the Sea of Languages Foreign to Oneself. Which sounds vaguely like the start of a list that the Cuban-born Italian writer Italo Calvino might have appreciated.

With apologies to the legacy of Mr. Calvino, it would go something like this: books written in languages entirely foreign oneself, the books written almost entirely foreign to oneself; and then to a list of books you have tried to read but stopped because they were in a language too foreign (to you) to be comprehensible, the list of books everyone tried to read but stopped because they (the books) were too badly written and therefore foreign to everyone, etc, etc, etc.

Which brings me again to the concept of distraction, which is the noun that perhaps best sums up the risks of opening a dictionary of languages of foreign to oneself. And the tendency of your new dictionary, like a five-year-old kid, to be so loud and raise so many damned questions.

Dictionaries are like an addictive drug. Etymological crack.

The prime psychological risk of a foreign language dictionary to a magpie such of myself (many interests, short attention span, prone to distraction by shiny objects) is what I will call The Tiny but Mighty Circumlocution Syndrome. Or more directly - distraction. The symptoms exhibit in my case as follows: you’re trying to complete some homework assigned from your course in a foreign (to yourself) language. You come across some cockamammy rule involving some exception to the rules governing the use of definite articles which precede masculine versus feminine nouns.

As an example I note that the Italians, the crazy-ass bastards that they are, for certain masculine-gendered nouns that begin with, the letters “gn” or “sb” use a different for of the equivalent of “the”. I mean really...it’s a three-letter contraction (well in English it’s three)– how much variation can there be. Well quite a darn lot, I tell you. There is Il, I, lo, gli, l’…and that is just the masculine “the”…not to mention the feminine “the” (which sounds kind of naughty) PLUS all the indefinite ones for each gender that are the equivalent of the indefinite articles “a “ and “an”.

So in pondering the mysteries of the use of articles in the Italian language (articles=”articolos”…masculine, plural, hence “I articolos”) I was puzzled, obviously.

But so many more things puzzle and raise difficult questions in my little vespa-coloured friend.
What about the masculine nouns that begin with, for example, with the letters “sb“. “What the Fuck?” as we say in modern English. A word that begins with “sb”? That’s so foreign. What kind of nut-case language has words that begin with ‘sb’?

So I pick up the yellow-jacket dizionario and then I find words that begin with “sd”. Ahhh – here’s a good one: Sdruciolo. Defined as (and I’m translating myself from the Italian now, which is to navigate a wide stretch of very treacherous waters) “of or relating to words that have the primary accent on the third from last syllable.”

What a weird-ass word.

I asked my teacher of Italian grammar, Maria Rosa, about this, how you say…sdruciolo. She gave me a look like “man, you have waaay too much time on your hands.” I asked her if sdruciolo actually has the accent on the third from last syllable, as I thought that would be sort of lexically appropriate. And actually, I thought it would be humorously ironic and somehow even more appropriately Italian if the word didn’t have the emphasis on the third from last syllable.

Maria Rosa said Italian really doesn’t use a lot of emphasis on syllables. I think the word is an obscure one related to the craft of poetry.

But here is the point of my whole tale. In looking up sdruciolo I found words in the definition of the word that I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND. And outcome is common when wading into dictionaries of languages quite foreign to oneself.

It’s like the beginning of an epidemic. The transmission factor can become exponential. If for every word you need to look up there are two words in its definition you don’t understand…well you see where I am going with this. You can be there all night. And then what happens (I swear I’ve done it 50 times) you FOREGET WHICH WORD IT WAS YOU LOOKED UP IN THE FIRST PLACE. AHHH!

I can only hope that if the quest to learn new languages kills me and I am not remembered fondly that some kind soul will defend me thus: “that man’s life was very poorly written…and translated even more poorly.”