Sooner or later your love of pets will lead to your having to speak
Italian. You might want to buy food, explain something to the vet or just wax
lyrical about how marvellous your cat or dog is to your Italian
neighbour. When you’re learning a new language mistakes are inevitable
but don’t think that becoming more fluent eliminates the howlers.
I speak passably good Italian, in fact, I’ve worked as a
translator and even sold advertising in Italian on the phone for God’s sake.
But last week while in the pet shop I noticed the face of the friendly
assistant rearranging itself into an all-too- familiar expression. It was that
of extreme politeness just failing to mask the urge to laugh.
“OK, what did I say?” I asked. I fess up instantly
these days.
“No, no” she assured me, smirking. “Niente.”
I mentally ran back through my lengthy monologue on my
beloved crow Merlina. I knew all the vocabulary. And then the penny dropped.
Hooded crow is a relatively new word for me and it is, in case you ever need to
know, cornacchia (kor-NACK-ee-ah). Sadly, that is not what I had just
said. Oh no. I had said cantuccio. A lot. I had explained how I
had rescued a biscuit, how my biscuit now lived in an aviary I had built myself
in the garden and how I was here looking for a toy for my biscuit as I was
worried it was bored.
When we first moved to Umbria my mistakes were
frequent and nearly always involved animals. Having tried to buy a packet of
lambs (agnelli) instead of curtain rings (anelli) in the
local hardware store I was off to a good start. Another day, I told the man in
the farm accessories shop that I needed a hill for my cat. He seemed quite
shocked by this simple request and told me they didn’t have any. Why on earth I
thought that collina (hill) was the word for collar (collare) I
have absolutely no idea, but to his credit he did his laughing in the stockroom
when he though I had gone.
My neighbour was just recovering from having to mime a rabbit for me, after she’d asked me to rescue her coniglie and I had no idea what she was on about. So she was quite wary as she approached me curiously one morning. What was I looking at? I was fairly sure I knew the word for falcon and so I confidently told her I had been watching a ‘fata’ and would she like to see it through my binoculars. “Are you sure?” she said looking at me incredulously. “Oh yes,” I replied. “I’ve seen quite a few.” She declined and made a quick exit. Alan informed me that falcon was not fata but falco and I had told her I’d seen a fairy.
I like using mnemonics to remember words and so when I learned that another word for porcupines (porcospini) was istrici I remembered it by thinking that it sounded very similar to oestrogen. And then of course I needed to retrieve the word when telling an Italian friend an animal anecdote. I began the sentence OK (you will find this happens a lot - start something and then not know how to finish) but then needed the magic word. Just in time I remembered it. Phew! "My dog," I said dramatically, "chased a hormone this morning!"
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