Bobby Manna Has Died

[Newyorkempire]

What the fuck is Salude? Get your shit right if youre going to rep an "Italian from the Northeast" image

[Ivan]

What the fuck is Salude?

Cheech is Italian-American, not Italian-Italian.

Italian language words get Americanized by the words mutating to better fit English-language phonology, and when they're written it's usually in the form of crude attempts to reflect the new Anglicized pronunciation. E.g., "vaffanculo" turns into "fongool", "a capito" turns into "gabeet" (shout out to PolackTony for that one lol), etc.

It's really common to the extent that it's basically the standard practice for such words.

[Cheech]

What the fuck is Salude?

Cheech is Italian-American, not Italian-Italian.

Italian language words get Americanized by the words mutating to better fit English-language phonology, and when they're written it's usually in the form of crude attempts to reflect the new Anglicized pronunciation. E.g., "vaffanculo" turns into "fongool", "a capito" turns into "gabeet" (shout out to PolackTony for that one lol), etc.

It's really common to the extent that it's basically the standard practice for such words.

Thank you Ivan. Better explanation than I would have given. Sorry Empire. Thats my fault

[johnny_scootch]

Melanzana becomes mulignan.

[SonnyBlackstein]

What the fuck is Salude? Get your shit right if youre going to rep an "Italian from the Northeast" image

Perdente becomes loser.

[PolackTony]

What the fuck is Salude?

Cheech is Italian-American, not Italian-Italian.

Italian language words get Americanized by the words mutating to better fit English-language phonology, and when they're written it's usually in the form of crude attempts to reflect the new Anglicized pronunciation. E.g., "vaffanculo" turns into "fongool", "a capito" turns into "gabeet" (shout out to PolackTony for that one lol), etc.

It's really common to the extent that it's basically the standard practice for such words.

You’re missing a key part though. These typical Italian-Americanisms are renderings of Southern Italian vernacular (“dialetti”) via English spellings, rather than of “Italian” lexical items (meaning the Standard Italian language) per se. “Gabeet” is basically the way that “Capito” is pronounced in Neapolitan and related vernaculars, it’s not an “Anglicized pronunciation”. Same as how “capocollo” is very much pronounced like “gabagol” in this same vernacular group. Same with basically all the other typical Italian-Americanisms one hears. These things are not butchered Italian in the way that people on the internet frequently assume. The ancestors of most Italian-Americans in places like the NE, Chicago, etc, did *not* arrive in the US as native speakers of standard Italian, but rather of their own local vernacular, with standard Italian being an artificial language imposed as a lingua franca for government, education, literature etc. The majority of Southern Italians who immigrated here were not well-educated and often had little to no facility in standard Italian.

Today, essentially everyone in Italy speaks standard Italian alongside their native vernacular, but that really is the product of later changes in Italian society in the 20th century due to advancing education standards and mass media. The Southern Italians who came to the US from the 1880s to 1920s were, in many ways, coming from a totally different world. Almost all of the pronunciations used in typical Italian-Americanisms are directly derived from traditional Neapolitan vernacular (by “Neapolitan”, I don’t mean solely the vernacular of the city of Naples, but the continuum of dialects spoken across Campania and neighboring regions, the heartland of the Kingdom of Naples). These things aren’t due to English language phonological influences, but rather are due to Napulitan’ phonology and grammar (eg, weakening or elision of word final vowels in unstressed position; voicing of unvoiced consonants [c -> g; p -> b, etc]; use of Neapolitan definite articles [o’ instead of il, etc); initial /s/ becomes /sh/ preceding another consonant; diphthongization or lengthening oof some vowels [o -> uo]). Hence, sfiogliatelle is pronounced in such a way that you would write it in English as “shfooyadell”; Italian “il pazzo” (the crazy one) becomes Neapolitan o’pazz’, which is pronounced as “ubatz”, etc etc etc.

Another common misconception is that the vernacular “dialetti” are just bastardized or “broken” variants of standard Italian. This is not the case. They are independent local languages that evolved from popular Latin over the centuries and are not derivatives of standard Italian. Standard Italian was itself developed as a literary language in the Renaissance and Early Modern period from the Fiorentino variant of the Tuscan vernacular group, due to the influence of writers like Dante, Petrarch, etc, from Florence. When the modern nation state of Italy was formed in the late 19th century, this language was adopted as the official state language and has since continually displaced and eroded the local vernacular languages.

[PolackTony]

Melanzana becomes mulignan.

This is yet another example of what I discuss above. Melanzana is the word for eggplant in *Italian*. The word for eggplant in Neapolitan, however, is mulignana, mainly pronounced with the final “a” weakened or dropped; hence, mulignan’. Despite common misconceptions, these things are not the product of “bad Italian” or English influence, but are 100% from the traditional vernacular languages of Southern Italy. Mainly from Neapolitan and closely related dialects (e.g., in Sicilianu, depending on the local dialect, eggplant is typically “milinciana”).

[Newyorkempire]

Salute becomes Salud if anything. There's no e on the end. Well understood by real Italian Americans