Roma: il Papa, il Colosseo, Francesco Totti
eh ma non tutto rose e fiori.
Many of you fell in love with Suburra , the TV series
that draws from the real-life events of Mafia Capitale, a mafia network and subsequent
police investigation focussing on power clashes and corruption in the Italian Bermuda triangle:
politics, religion and organised crime.
No, pizza with pineapple and mozzarella is not included in the triangle.
Even if you should f... rot in jail, if you ate one of those.
Anyway, if you like the TV series, the romanesco dialect is not impossible to understand,
subtitles help,
BUT, what if I told you that you can learn in the next 5 minutes some of the dialects
and enjoy Suburra even more.
Ma cosa significa Suburra o Subura, with one R?
Suburra was a crowded lower-class area in the City of Rome. Julius Caesar lived in the Suburra district,
which was a place where politicians met with criminals to plot as well as a well-known
red-light district.
Iniziamo.
In this video, I am going to talk about 4 of the main features of the contemporary romanesco
In Romanesco, final vowels and syllables are NOT always pronounced.
And there is also the case of the "E" before the syllable in which the accent occurs.
Difficult to grasp? Let's first watch this clip together.
Let me show you this on the slide:
So the pronoun TI (you) becomes TE before the syllabe in which the accent occurs STO,
but also see farTE in the place of farTI before diventare/diventà, become.
The other thing you may want to notice here is
the recurring feature of dropping syllables at the end:
crescere becomes cresce diventare becomes diventà
Everybody knows famous expressions such as...
therefore the preposition DI becomes DE
Let's have a look at the slide now:
Ma andiamo avanti, I want to see some blood. Let's move on. Next scene:
It's not Chinese, it's romanesco. Let's have a look at the slide now:
Like in Neapolitan and most Italian southern dialects the ND becomes NN:
We can see this consonant assimilation in "andare" becoming "annà":
In this regard, it is worth mentioning that the verb endings of the first-person plural
change from -iamo to -amo (-are verbs), -emo (-ere verbs), -imo (-ire verbs). For example:
This phenomenon is called rhotacization, however since I like the slogan Parla come mangi
(Speak Like you Eat, speak simple), this is what I am talking about:
Where is the rhotacisation? DE soRdi < Di soLdi. The L is pronounced as an R.
It's a recurring feature. Watch this:
Li sordi < I soldi < The money.
Insomma, this is a short sample of the many features that make the romanesco one of the
most known Italian dialects. And since you got a soft spot for crime series and Italian
dialects, why don't you subscribe
and watch this video here about Neapolitan dialect and the Tv series Gomorrah.
Dal Maestro è tutto. Non me rompete er c****: studiate!
I came, I saw, I conquered - Julius Caesar