[pct-l] Introduction

[pmags at yahoo.com (Paul Magnanti)]

>>Agua Dulce: didn't you take 7th grade Spanish?=)
>>AH-gwuh DULL-say, if you're


If you can't tell by my last name, my ancestry is
Italian. (Abruzzese if you wanna really be precise.
:D)

Anyway, I took 9th and 10th grade Italian. (My
homestate of RI has a population where almost 1 out
every 5  people is of that ancestry. Many high schools
offer Italian in addtion to Spanish and French).
Learned to say "Mi nome e Paolo"  to go with the more
"colorful" words that somehow stayed in the
vernacular. Fifteen years later, I still remember the
more "colorful" dialect words but alas not the many
verbs Mrs. DiPrete tried to to have us conjugate. 

To wrap up this little conversation, what did I do
when I saw the Spanish names in So. Cal? By default
ended up pronouncing them the  wrong way! Instead of
"gringo style" pronoucned them in an odd combo of a
person from the Northeast attempting to speak Italian
attempting to speak Spanish. :-) 

Agua Dulce became "Ah-qwa Dol-chay" for example. I am
sure the locals cringed way too often. All was better
again when I arrived in northern California and points
futher north. Merely tried to pronounce English names
in the remnants of my Rhode Island-ese way of
speaking. Debatable which way was harder for other
people to understand. ;-D 



=====
************************************************************
The true harvest of my life is intangible.... a little stardust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched
--Thoreau
http://www.magnanti.com