Italy Five - Text
Subject is female, in her 20's, from Lecco, in Northern Italy near the border of Switzerland. She spent her time in Milan as a university student, and she also spent one year in The Netherlands, where she had to take classes in English also as a university student. She started studying English when she was eleven. She went to a linguistic high school where she learned German, French, and also English. Subject demonstrates the difference between the Northern Italian and Southern Italian dialect on the pronunciation of 'Lake Como'. This was recorded by Yuji Tsuboi and Paul Meier on 3.08.00 and edited by Paul Meier a few days later. Running time: 00:03:39.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
"I was born in Lecco, but I never live there. It's just that is the place where my mother was born so she wanted to go back to where her family lives to bore the children. And I grew up in a little village very close to the border to Switzerland kind of 10 kilometers to the Switzerland. The Italian part of the Switzerland where they speak Italian. And there is a little village on the lake of Lugano more or less four thousand inhabitants, and I live there until I was a 19 then to go to the university. The nearest university for us is in Milan. So I had to move to Milan. And ah... I studied there at the university. I studied the Italian literature, and ah.. during the university, I moved for one year in the Netherlands. And I have lived there one year in the Netherlands in Amsterdam because I attended one year of university there. And then ah.. when I finished my university I came here to the US for two month because I wanted to... to take a Ph.D. here so I went ah.. I travel a little bit around the US visiting different universities and meeting with different professors. And ah... then I went back to Italy. I work for one year in an advertising company while I was preparing of my application to come here. And then I received the news I entered. I've been admitted at the department of history for Ph.D. here at KU. And I moved in August ninety-nine year to Kansas. But I really miss Italy a lot. Haha... I come as I told from the real North of Italy where we pronounce the words very closed. For example, the lake close to where we live is the lake of Como, we say. We pronounce it Como while people from south of Italy would pronounce it Como, which is different. And ah.. my brother is telling that I'm started to pronounce all the vowel as people from south of Italy and ah.. I'm pronouncing the words of really open. And then, I feel that this was because of the pronunciation of here in Kansas. When I listen, I mean to the programs from the local television, when I talk to my students in class, when I talk to my other classmates, I mean it's really open of the pronunciation. And that is ah.. I cannot hear in that, I mean I do not realize it, but it was not only my brother. My brother told me a...you know, I was talking also with the other friends, and they told the same. You really started to change your pronunciation in Italia.
Il nome del mio paese e' Porlezza e si trova sul lago di Lugano. Porlezza e' un paesino molto, molto bello perche' si trova in fondo a una valle ed e' circondato dalle Alpi, dalle montagne. Si trova sul lago di Lugano che e' tutto in Svizzera tranne una piccolissima parte in Italia. E' un posto estremamente isolato perche' ci sono solo due strade che lo collegano al resto del mondo, e sono delle strade molto strette: da una parte c'e' direttamente la montagna e dall'altra parte a strapiombo il lago.
[TRANSLATION: The name of my village is Porlezza and it is near the lake of Lugano. Porlezza is a little village very, very beautiful, as it is located in a valley and it is surrounded by the Alps. It is near the lake of Lugano, which lies mostly in Switzerland, except for a small part that is in Italy. [Porlezza] is a very isolated place, as there are only two roads that connect it to the rest of the world, and both of them are very narrow: on one side there is directly the mountain, on the other side the lake".]
Transcribed by Yuji Tsuboi; edited by Kevin Flynn, Associate Editor for Transcriptions, February 11, 2008