Sono tornato

Just a quick note to say that I'm back after a 3-year hiatus. Long story short: I got married, bought a house, and then, let's just say life happened. Hope to post more items here soon, I have a couple of neat ideas.

Pesce d'Aprile!

Sorry for the long absence, I've been busy watching a lot of Italian film for a class that I've been taking. And doing a lot of homework!

Anyway, I'm a little late for April Fool's Day (Pesce d'Aprile in italiano), but wanted to share this classic film clip from the Simpsons (I Simpson).

Happy April Everyone!



Here are some of the quotes from the clip:

0:29 Homer, to Bart: Non riesce a fare scherzo a tua madre nel giorno piu schersosi nella tua vita e anche se avessi una macchina elettroscherzi!
(You couldn't fool your own mother on the foolingest day of your life with an electrified fooling machine!

3:30 Lou the Cop: Quell'esplosione sembra provvenire dalla casa di Homer Simpson!
(That explosion seems like it's coming from the ol' Simpson place!)
Chief Wiggum: Non ti agitare! E solo .... ??
(Don't get so worked up! That's two blocks away!)
Lou the Cop: Veniva fuori uscire birra della canna fumaiola!
(It looks like beer is coming out of the chimney!)
Chief Wiggum: Io procedo da piedi, tu comunica un Codice Otto!
(I'm going in on foot, you call in a Code 8!)
Lou the Cop: Ci servono dei salatini! Repeto, salatini!
(We need some pretzels! Repeat, pretzels!)

I just can't make out what the Chief is saying, he has a heavy accent. If anyone else understands it please let me know.

Meno male!

Apologies for being AWOL the last couple of weeks.  I started a new Italian language class and have been busy watching films and doing the related homework.

This year's Sanremo Festival is by now in the books...but I'd still like to focus on a couple of the songs I found interesting.  Simone Cristicchi had an interesting entry entitled Meno Male ("It's a good thing") that is a sarcastic look at Italian mass media and pop culture.  Here is the song and the lyrics:



(You can also read the lyrics from angolotesti.it here.)

The chorus of the song is:

Meno male che c’è Carla Bruni
Siamo fatti così - Sarkonò Sarkosì
Che bella Carla Bruni
se si parla di te il problema non c’è
io rido… io rido…

It's a good thing that there's Carla Bruni,
We're so spaced out: Sarko-NO, Sarko-YES
How beautiful (you are), Carla Bruni,
If we talk about you, then there are no more problems!
I laugh...I laugh...

As you can guess, the whole premise of the song is that as long as we think of Carla Bruni (supermodel and now wife of French President Sarkosy), then all is well.

In the song we also hear:

C’è la crisi mondiale che avanza
e i terremotati ancora in vacanza
...
C’è l’Italia dei video ricatti
c’è la nonna coi seni rifatti
e vissero tutti felici e contenti
ma disinformati sui fatti
Osama è ancora latitante
l’ho visto ieri al ristorante!
Lo so che voi non mi credete
se sbaglio mi corigerete

There's the world financial crisis that's looming,
and the earthquake victims (of L'Aquila) that are still displaced
...
Here is the Italy of the blackmail video
Here is the grandmother with the breast implants
And they lived happy and content
but uninformed about the facts.
Osama is still on the run,
yesterday I saw him in a restaurant!
I know that you don't believe me,
If I'm wrong then correct me!

Among the interesting grammatical constructions we find:

1. meno male: Literally it means "a less bad thing", which is equivalent to "a good thing".
2. si parla: The impersonal. Literally "one talks", but you can render this into English as "you talk", "we talk", "they talk", etc.
3. siamo fatti: The word fatti can mean "deeds", but this is an idiomatic usage which means spaced out, zonked out, high
4. coi: Contraction for con i. You don't see this too often in conversation nowadays but you will tend to see this more in literature. You also see this in poetry and music, where fitting the text into a certain number of syllables is important. You will also see the contraction col = con il in some settings as well.
5. The passato remoto (vissero = they lived), which indicates an action that took place in a time period that is long before today.
6. latitante: adjective which means "on the run"
7. l'ho visto: An example of euphony changing spelling. The lo is the direct object pronoun, referring to Osama, so it's masculine. Normally this would be lo ho visto but it sounds more pleasing to the ear if we run the lo and the ho together.
8. Lo so che ... (I know that ...). As mentioned in a previous post, in Italian you don't just KNOW, you KNOW IT. Thus you need the direct object pronoun.

But I think my favorite part of the song is at the end, where Cristicchi basically does us favor and conjugates the double pronoun verb prendersela (to take it to heart) for us:

Io me la prendo con qualcuno
tu te la prendi con qualcuno
lui se la prende con qualcuno
E sbatte la testa contro il muro
Io me la prendo con qualcuno
tu te la prendi con qualcuno
lui se la prende con qualcuno
noi ce la prendiamo...

I take it to heart with someone
You take it to heart with someone
He (she) takes it to heart seriously with someone
And smashes his (her) head against the wall
I take it to heart with someone
You take it to heart with someone
He (she) takes it to heart with someone
We take ourselves seriously ...

We'll save double pronoun verbs for another day. The best way to think of them is that they kind of act like reflexive verbs, but take a direct object as well. And also the spelling is always changed in double pronouns (mi -> me, ti -> te, si -> se, ci -> ce, vi -> ve, etc.)

Meno male si trova i brani di Sanremo sulla rete!
(It's a good thing you can find the videos from Sanremo on the net!)

Sanremo 2010

Hope you are all watching the Sanremo Festival 2010!  This is the annual festival of Italian song, held each year at Sanremo (in Liguria).  Italy pretty much shuts down while the festival is happening, with everyone being glued to their TV sets.

In years past, there has been some great performances at the Sanremo festival.  This one by Adriano Celentano is one of my favorites.  This entry, Canzone, took second place at Sanremo 1968:



Sanremo 2010 started off with 15 artists in the competition, which lasts for 5 nights.  (One of the artists is the winner of X-factor, which is a show similar to "American Idol".)   At the end of each night a couple of artists are eliminated until the "final showdown". Some of the artists are new, some are veteran singers...and I also believe there is a separate category called "Sanremo nuovo generazione" which are the up-and-coming young singers.

Among the artists at Sanremo 2010 was Toto Cutugno (renowned for his 1982 hit L'italiano), who sung Aeroplani.  A great song, but unfortunately it didn't make the cut after the first night of the festival.



If you have the RAI International channel on cable, then you can watch the festival as it happens. If not, then you can go to the website www.sanremo.rai.it to view the individual performances after each night's competition is completed.  (Due to copyright laws, live streaming  of the Festival outside Italy is not permitted.)

More about Sanremo to come later....for now I'm going to listen to some musica italiana!  Buon ascolto!

Buona festa di San Valentino a tutti!

Buona festa di San Valentino a tutti gli innamorati ... sopratutto questi che parlano italiano!
(Happy Valentine's Day to all those in love...especially those who speak Italian!)

I leave you with Massimo Ranieri's rendition of Rose Rosse ... a truly wonderful and touching song.



Chorus

Forse in amore le rose non s'usano piu
Ma questi fiori sapranno parlarti di me
Rose rosse per te, ho comprato stasera
E il tuo cuore lo sa cosa voglio da te!

Perhaps (when you're) in love flowers are out of fashion
But these flowers will know how to talk to you about me
Red roses for you, I bought (them) last night
And your heart knows what I want from you!

Now there are a couple of interesting grammar points here.

1. non s'usano piu = non si usano piu'
   
   1. The si merges w/ usano for euphony's sake, we'll discuss that in a later post
   2. This is an idiomatic expression of usare, which means "they are out of fashion, they have no more use"
2. sapranno parlarti di me
   
   1. When sapere is used with an infinitive, it means "to know how to do something".
   2. Also remember we can add a direct object pronoun right onto an infinitive, so sapranno parlarti di me = they will know how to talk to you about me.
   3. Finally, sapranno is the 3rd person future tense of sapere.
3. E il tuo cuore lo sa
   
   1. Unlike in English, the definite article (in this case, il) is used when making the possessive, even though it's not translated. So even though il tuo cuore literally translates to "the your heart", you don't translate the "the"...it just renders as "your heart".  (The only exception to this rule is when you are talking about family members, then you usually drop the definite article: mia madre, mio zio, etc.)
   2. Whenever you know something in Italian, you know it (i.e. the direct object pronoun has to be used).  So in English we'd say, "And my heart knows" but in Italian it strictly translates to E il tuo cuore lo sa ("And my heart knows it"). You can of course omit the "it" part when rendering into English.

You can read the lyrics from angolotesti.it as well.  (Angolo = corner and testi = lyrics or text, so angolotesti = lyrics corner.)

You can also look at this karaoke version of Rose Rosse from Youtube.  I find that looking at Karaoke videos is a really good way to learn Italian song lyrics and pick up new vocabulary along the way.

The fare causativo (or how to get someone to do what you want)

One of my favorite songs is La Notte by Salvatore Adamo:



In the song you will hear the following line:

La notte, tu mi fai impazzire.
(Night, you make me go crazy.)

This is a wonderful example of the fare causativo in Italian.  This is how you express the idea of

1. Making someone (or something) do an action. 
2. Making someone (or something) do an action to someone else (or something else) 

This is a very common construction, and you will see this all over the place, in both written and spoken Italian.

The fare causativo construction consists of 3 or 4 elements:

1. indirect object  +  
2. conjugated form of fare  +  
3. an infinitive  +
4. an optional direct object

1) The indirect object is always the person or thing that is going to do the action.  (This may be a indirect object pronoun (i.e. mi, ti, gli/le, ci, vi, gli) or disjunctive prepositional phrase (i.e. a me, a te, etc.)

Thus in our example from the song, because "me" is the thing that is going to do the action "go crazy", we need to list it as an indirect object pronoun...thus mi fai impazzire.

2) The conjugated form of fare determines the person (or thing) that is the prime instigator of the action.  So in the case of our example text, "Night, you make me go crazy"...the instigator of "making me go crazy" is "you" (referring to "Night").  Therefore, the conjugated form of fare has to be fai.

And don't forget, the conjugated form of fare can be in any tense.  So you could also have any of the following:

• mi hai fatto impazzire  
  (passato prossimo: You made me go crazy)
• mi facevi impazzire   
  (imperfetto: You used to make me go crazy)
• mi avevi fatto impazzire   
  (trapassato: You had made me go crazy)
• mi facesti impazzire   
  (passato remoto: you made me go crazy (a looooong time ago))
• mi faccia impazzire   
  (pres. subjunctive: you might make me go crazy) 
• mi facessi impazzire   
  (imp. subjunctive: you might have made me go crazy)
• mi faresti impazzire   
  (conditional: you would make me go crazy)
• mi avresti fatto impazzire   
  (past conditional: you would have made me go crazy)
• etc.

3) The infinitive represents the action to be done.  Thus we need to use impazzire, which means "to go mad, to go crazy".

4) The action can also take a direct object (although our example from the song does not have one).  If so, then you can just add the direct object noun or pronoun (mi, ti lo/la/Le, ci, vi, li/le).

Here are some more examples of the fare causativo.  If you wanted to say, "I make you check my tires", you can say:

A te faccio controllare le gomme.
(Literally: To you I make to check my tires.)

You could simplify this by replacing the indirect object prepositional phrase a te with the indirect object pronoun ti:

Ti faccio controllare le gomme.
(Literally: To you, I make check my tires)

and you could even use a direct object pronoun for "tires" as well.  In this case you end up with a double pronoun such as:

Te le faccio controllare.
(Literally: To you, I make to check them)

Double pronoun lesson is for another day. :-)

P.S.  As a bonus, check out Salvatore Adamo's La Nuit, which is the French-language version of the song La Notte.  Fantastico!

Torto vs. Tolto

One of the things that would always trip me up (and sometimes still does!) was the similar spelling of torto and tolto.  Both are past participles of diffferent verbs:

• torto = past participle of torcere (to twist, wring out)
• tolto = past participle of togliere (to take off, take away, remove, lift)

Torto can also be used as an adjective meaning "wrong", in the sense of "everything is so twisted around that it's not right".  (Note, the strong correspondence between adjectives and past participles, we'll visit that in a future blog entry.)

Torto is used with avere to express "being wrong".  In other words, it's not that you are wrong, but that you have the wrong.  So for example, you can have the following constructions in the various tenses:

• ho torto (passato prossimo: I was wrong)
• avevo torto (imperfect: I was being wrong, I used to be wrong)
• avevo avuto torto (trapassato: I had been wrong)
• ebbi torto (passato remoto: I was wrong a loooooooooooooong time ago)
• etc.

This is similar to the other idiomatic expressions with avere: ho caldo (I'm hot), ho freddo (I'm cold), ho sonno (I'm sleepy), ho fame (I'm hungry), etc.

The opposite of ho torto is ho ragione (I'm right).   For example, a recent blog article was entitled Feltri ha ragione, Berlusconi ha torto (Feltri is right, Berlusconi is wrong).

Similarly, we can conjugate togliere.  Although in this case ho tolto etc. does not have any special idiomatic meaning, it is just the normal way of making the past tense.

• ho tolto (passato prossimo: I removed)
• avevo tolto (imperfect: I was removing, I used to remove)
• avevo avuto tolto (trapassato: I had removed)
• ebbi tolto (passato remoto: I removed a loooooooooooooong time ago)
• etc.

One last thing.  Togliere can form a reflexive verb togliersi, which means to take something away (from oneself).   As with all reflexive verbs, the past tenses are formed with essere rather than avere.

• mi sono tolto (passato prossimo: I took ___ away)
• mi ero tolto (imperfect: I was taking away, I used to take ___ away)
• mi ero stato tolto (trapassato: I had taken ___ away)
• mi fui tolto (passato remoto: I took ___ away a  loooooooooooooong time ago)
• etc.