Mafia Swagger

[darkerhorse]

@1:50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOgIye_oyU0

I think the actress was Sardinian, so perhaps her pronunciation varied from true Sicilian.

[darkerhorse]

However, starting at 2:42 she appears to say to Don Ciccio "mi marito" when referring to her husband and "figghiu mio or figghiu miu" when referring to her son Paolo.

Of course, I'm listening with American ears.

What say you?

[darkerhorse]

When she refers to her son Vito - spare my only son - she seems to say "figghiu mi".

[MarcuccioV]

I'm sure there are sub-dialects within the island just as there are on the mainland. After all, many of these towns were walled-off to prevent invasion which also prevented interlopers from other communes for the most part, so dialects could easily differ from town-to-town while still maintaining similar characteristics.

An old family friend from Puglia (Bari) once told me the people in a neighboring commune to his spoke a dialect he barely understood -- and the villages were only a few miles apart.

I know that some Sicilians pronounce the Italian word "questo" as 'kees-toe' and some as 'keed-doe'. Go figure. My grandmother's burina dialect was 'keesh-toe', close to the first Sicilian pronunciation.

And yes, "mea" was spoken as 'may-uh'.

And for sons it was more like "figghiu meo". Definitely with a long "o" sound at the end...

[MarcuccioV]

As for the GFII references, I always wondered about that dialect as it differed considerably from the Sicilian I was used to hearing spoken. And these were people from Palermo province, where the movie is supposed to take place...

It's possible there was a difference between the "old world" Sicilian and that spoken by emigrants who were sometimes forced to communicate with mainland Italian emigrants of varying dialects & modified it slightly so as to be understood better...

[darkerhorse]

Of course, there's always "mea culpa" in Latin.

When Michael introduces Fredo to his bodyguard, it sounds like he says "Mia frati". Go figure.

They certainly made an effort to use cognates in the three movies, so maybe word accuracy was compromised. And, the subtitles aren't always literal translations for sure.

And, I know there's a difference between vocative and other cases. but Mrs. A. definitely never says "mea". Her "my" does seem to come after son when she's using the vocative (with Paolo) and before son or husband when she's not using the vocative.

I did find the Sicilian word "figghiamia", which I suppose could be "mia figghia" (mafia?) in the vocative, but again, not "mea". Maybe some Sicilians use the Latin "mea".

[MarcuccioV]

With respect to you GF film references, the actor who portrayed Michael's cacciatore "Calo" while in Sicily was from a commune very close to my grandparent's town in Lazio (Zagarolo). While he may have had a "burino" dialect (akin to my grandmother's which has some Sicilian similarities), he clearly speaks Sicilian in his dialogue, which would lead me to believe the production used a Sicilian dialogue coach (at least for the performers that were not native Sicilian).

Where that coach was from may have colored the pronunciations of some of the actors... Just a thought.

[MarcuccioV]

This arrived in one of my inboxes -- it translates in an odd way, but does shed SOME light on the subject...

https://www.academia.edu/1099126/_Mafia ... view-paper