The most important rules seem to be missing here. Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable. Some Italian words have emphasis on the third-to-last syllable, e.g. 'il semAforo' (the traffic light) but that is the exception. Putting emphasis in the right place is the most important thing that makes Italian sound like Italian. If you do just this it already starts to sound like Italian. Another important thing in pronouncing Italian is that the words have to flow together. It is like you should ignore that there are spaces between words. I suppose that already would come more or less naturally to singers. The rules that the article mentions about c and g are also quite important.
> Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable.
Same thing in Spanish: The emphasis also tends to be on the second-to-last syllable[0]. Unfortunately, many language teachers never tell you that. (In fact, I once had to tell a Spanish teacher and she was surprised the rule checked out.)
[0]: More precisely, the rules are (I had to look them up as they have become so ingrained in me that I no longer remember them):
> If a word ends with a vowel, or the letters ‘s’ or ‘n’, the penultimate syllable is stressed.
> If a word ends with a consonant other than ‘s’ or ‘n’, the final syllable is stressed.
These are the orthographic rules for where to when to write the tilde, viewed from the other side. This has only a tenuous connection to how the stresses are actually distributed—while placing stress before the last stem consonant is indeed the most common noun stress pattern, e.g. verb inflections are a lot more all over the place; if you pull up a typical conjugation table, some half of the entries need explicit accents because they don't follow these rules.
The choice of which patterns to designate as default and which to write with accents is honestly kind of arbitrary. One can easily imagine an alternate universe where the standard orthography allocates accents by counting vowel letters instead of syllables, or with the slightly more synchronically opaque "last stem consonant" formulation, or one where coda n is formally regarded as a vowel—this doesn't require an AU, actually, just compare orthographies with the other Iberian Romance standards.
(There's this one particularly notable pattern where final syllables with high vowel nuclei are almost always stressed in native vocav, which e.g. occurs reliably in 1st-person preterite conjugations. They're written with the tilde anyway, but it didn't have to be this way; no hispanophone sees "recibi" and entertains the possibility that it might have grave stress, that would sound unnatural even if they can't point out exactly what's wrong with it.)
Surely, from the tildes and the ortographic rules one can figure out which syllable has the stress (non-ambiguously).
In your example, recibí specifies where the stress is (last), even if it is the first time one sees this word. Same for recibo (second-to-last) or repopo (invented word).
The tilde rules (vowel, ending in n or s, plus diptongos, hiatos and specified exceptions) are consistent. There is no breaking of rules in verb conjugations. Most are stressed second-to-last, but that is not the rule, just an observation.
> Another important thing in pronouncing Italian is that the words have to flow together. It is like you should ignore that there are spaces between words.
I believe this is true for all languages. It’s certainly true for English — there is no pause between words in natural native speech.
When I listen to German the words seem more distinct from one another than Spanish or Italian. I wonder if it’s a reflection of how many words in the language end in consonants vs vowels.
Perception is a funny thing. It’s entirely possible that the words seem distinct to you for whatever reason, but that no difference would be apparent on an actual spectrogram.
I know at least two more languages where emphasis (stress) is standardized. In French and in Armenian it's always on the last syllable. With some exceptions of course, typically borrowed words, sometimes compound words.
The advantage of this is, it helps the brain separate and recognize the words faster. When we speak, the words are mostly glued together and from the point of view of speech recognition it can take some trial and error before the brain or your speech-to-text system can understand where each word ends. The standard-accented languages (I'm sure there's a term for that in linguistics?) make the job a bit easier. Anyway, just a fun fact.
In addition to this if you are a native English speaker loosen the muscles of your mouth when you speak Italian.
Different languages require different movements of muscles and if you don’t adapt it just sounds like Italian with an English accent.
To quote an Italian: “…the English speak Italian with a closed mouth..”. I guess this is similar to the way Japanese people never seem to pronounce “L” correctly because the tongue movements are unfamiliar to them.
What’s funny is if you learn Italian well and travel around people will assume you are well educated from your lack of dialect like pronunciation/words.
It's a primer for singers. In music, the emphasis and flow between words is given for you.
Aside: There are other biases built into Italian singing that will trip up singers in spoken Italian, too. For example, Italian opera is largely written in a metric form where the phrase emphasis is ALWAYS on the last word. That teaches singers an instinct for odd sentence structure, or for putting a weird accent where it doesn't need to exist in speech.
> Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable
Omg, that works like a charm hahaha. I just read some Italian (which I don’t speak) with this rule and I felt like I sounded Italian hahaha. Actually, using this rule to read English or french makes it sound Italian as well, great rule, thanks !! :)
Unless it's a verb that ends with -ano. In that case, stress the preceding consonant. It's kind of like the difference between urAnus and Uranus. There are other exceptions, but that's the most common and important one.
It's a general rule of thumb, so it wouldn't apply to proper nouns, but I did edit to specify verbs rather than all words in general. I do appreciate the irony that the example I chose breaks that guideline.
I wonder how many more years will it take before people stop using italo-american stereotypes when referring to italians, or at least update them to something earlier than the 50's
Good primer I'd say but what @cjfd says it's true, the emphasis is really important and can change a lot your pronunciation, focusing on that is really important.
There is a mistake in there though, gl is not always pronunced similar to the middle of the english word "million", it is only if it's followed by an i and not even in every case.
For example in inglese, sigla, gloria, etc the gl is pronounced like in english.
Instead in figli, raccogliere, etc the gl is pronounced similar to the middle of the word "million" because there is an i after it.
But there are are exceptions like geroglifico, glissare, glicemia, ganglio, etc, in those gl is pronounced like in english even if there is an i after gl.
This. I've studied the IPA once, and now it's way easier to learn new words in languages I don't know. It kinda gets messy when representing strange sounds full of diacritics though, but I guess there's no good way around that.
IPA is an amazing tool, but learning how to pronounce unfamiliar words without consulting a dictionary (to look up IPA transcription) is also a useful skill.
Italian is one of the most melodic languages in the world, but some words can be difficult to pronounce. A good way to practice diction is tongue twisters. These phrases work as a physical exercise for your tongue, lips, and cheeks. Here is a good selection of some tongue twisters: https://ivypanda.com/tongue-twisters-italian
The best way to pronounce "gl" is to use the middle.ll in "million" while pushing the front of your tongue against your palate, moving it forward until the tip touches the back of your upper front teeth. It's basically identical to "lh" in Portuguese
It doesn't say anything about doubles, which is a rather important element in Italian pronunciation.
What I've been told is that for non-Italians the best trick is to try to shorten the vowel before the double. This will naturally make the double longer, as it should be.
I'm Italian but not a teacher. The rules seems mostly reasonable but I think the author is wrong in the Diphthongs section. In the word "pietà" the "i" is not pronounced as in yarn. If you want an "i" as in yarn you need something like "iato".
In my personal opinion (not at all an expert on languages) an English speaker should work mostly on "gn" and "gl" since in Italian they form a single sound together while English speaking people split the sounds in two parts like "g-n".
I think you're mistaken about the 'y' part; what the author is trying to convey is that [i] in Italian is both the vowel /i/ and the consonant /j/ depending on the context. /j/ is typically rendered in English using [y] (but not always). Pietà is definitely /pje'ta/, not /pie'ta/, like the [i] in ieri /'jeri/ - at least that's how I've always pronounced that.
It would have been better if Italian just kept using the letter [j] - it was invented by an Italian guy to solve this kind of ambiguity after all.
I don't think the person is mistaken, I think people pronounce it in different ways depending on where they come from. The three examples here does not seem to be pronounced like ieri:
As a native, I do agree with the original (pietà is not pjetà).
So maybe it is a regional pronunciation issue.
Or maybe it's like someone who can feel that the proper plural of "figlio" (figli) would have a long "i" (figlî, in some old books) even if it's not really there anymore.
Italian phonology is clear - approximants like /j/ and /w/ always appear in diphthongs, unless in very rare occurrences; i.e. ài, èi, éi, òi, ói, ùi; àu, èu, éu -> /aj/, /εj/, /ej/, /ɔj/, /oj/, /uj/; /aw/, / εw/, /ew/.
For instance, piede is /'pjede/, while tuorlo is /'tworlo/.
IPA in Italian dictionaries is very rare, but the only examples I found specify /'pjeta/. Italian pronunciation has never been standardized by anyone, so pronunciation may vary, but unless my knowledge of phonology is completely wrong there's an appoximant in "pietà", like in pieno /'pjeno/ and piano /'pjano/.
To avoid i to switch to /j/ there needs to be a "iato", which splits words onto two separate syllables. For instance, mormorio is /mormo'rio/, not /mormo'rjo/. In this case, the word gets split in syllables as mor-mo-RI-o, and the i doesn't become an approximant. Pietà is pie-TÀ, not pi-e-TÀ, because the ie is in a diphthong, so it's /je/.
... and on double consonants (like BTW a number of Italians, which regional pronounce can be quite opposite, as an example venetians making any double single and romans making most single doubles) ...
The "j" was once used in writing too, called "i consonantica" when it is followed by a vowel, it remained in historical names like Jacopo but became a "normal" i in - say - acciaio (that was once written acciajo).
In italian the zz in pizza is voiced loud, in razzo is unvoiced like in the example you made. And of course I assume that pizza is na italian world, and all english dialects that pronounce different from the original are wrong
It's pretty hard to pin this down firmly since attested pronunciations range wider than you seem to think, but based on what you've said in this thread, it seems like a good idea to sanity-check on the voiced/unvoiced distinction.
Well, we have also razza and razza (as in race/breed and spoke/ray/stingray) and they are respectively /ˈrat.t͡sa/ and /ˈrad.d͡za/ where the difference in pronounciation is key to the meaning.
Pizza is definitely /ˈpit.t͡sa/ (and both the t and the s are voiced).
Razzo (rocket) is /ˈrad.d͡zo/, BUT razzolare is /rat.t͡soˈla.re/ .
The z, single or double, is one of the tricky ones to pronounce properly, in Italian they are usually called zeta dura and zeta dolce "hard z" and "sweet z".
