Italian Pronunciation: A Primer for Singers (2016)
web.stanford.edu
web.stanford.edu
I recommend this 1996 book by McGee: Singing early music : the pronunciation of European languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance
https://www.worldcat.org/title/singing-early-music-the-pronu...
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.
AFAIK there is no exception at all to this rule in French.
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.
I believe this is true for all languages. It’s certainly true for English — there is no pause between words in natural native speech.
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 !! :)
Note: but don't forget that there are plenty of exceptions and words that differ only on the position of the stress.
Good I like to drag out my 'Thats amoooooooooooooore' as much as possible :)
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.
Source: https://blog.lingoda.com/en/all-about-spanish-accent-marks-a...
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.
Or am I misunderstanding something?
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.
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.
Source: am italian.
Feel free to ask questions. :)
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.
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".
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 saw it still being used on some street signs. Jonio, Jesolo, ...
https://forvo.com/word/piet%C3%A0/
Perchance you're speaking a dialect? Happens to all of us. :)
Not a native speaker and my Italian is terrible, but I've always loved the Italian i vowels. They are so clear and distinct.
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.
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).
Things like this is why using example words to clarify pronunciation is often a bad idea, especially with a language as diverse as English.
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".
In the following clips, [1] has voice, [2] has unvoiced: [1]: https://audio00.forvo.com/audios/mp3/3/k/3k_9459069_74_57198... [2]: https://audio00.forvo.com/audios/mp3/s/x/sx_9001968_74_57198...