Just enough Italian pronunciation

Does the experience of stumbling over place names as you travel to a foreign country sound familiar to you? Trip planning brings up the importance of pronouncing foreign words in a comprehensible fashion.

My husband, Wayne, and I ran into this very problem as we sat at our laptops recently, hoping to rent a villa in Tuscany, Italy for a summer house party with family and friends.  We found ourselves inventing pronunciations or, as a last resort, spelling the name aloud to each other. Communication slowed to a crawl as we tried to help each other locate listings or find cities on a map.

Explanations of correct pronunciation of the Italian language abound on the Internet.  But who wants to wade through a lot of technical phonetic information?  Not even me, who claims to love anything and everything related to Linguistics!  So I decided to take the baby step of writing down ten Tuscan place names and learning just enough to pronounce them according to rules of Italian pronunciation.

My native language is English, but I also speak Spanish.  I began the task by ignoring Italian sounds that are similar to Spanish.  (So I'm going to speak Italian with a Spanish accent? Probably!)

I struck the five vowel sounds off my list, even though Italian has open and closed versions of "e" and "o" which Spanish does not.  I figured I could pick up that difference by listening to native speakers.

First I learned that most Italian words are pronounced with the stress on the next to the last syllable.  Some words carry stress on the last syllable or the third from the last syllable.  I'll be on the lookout for those exceptions as I listen to spoken Italian.

Here is my list of Tuscan place names that may require special attention to pronounce correctly.

*Bagni di Lucca.  The "gn" is similar to the Spanish "ñ" or the "ny" in the English "canyon."  Double "c" requires a longer pronunciation.

*Ponte Buggianese.  The "gg" is a challenge because the first "g" is the familiar hard sound (as in "golf" in Spanish or English) but the second "g" appears before the vowel "i", so it takes on a soft sound, like the English "gem."  The "s" between vowels becomes a "z" sound.

*Casciana Terme.  The letter combination "sci" becomes a "sh" sound.

*Pienza.  "Z' in the middle of a word is "ts."

*Ponticino.  "C" before "i" has a "ch" sound like "China" in Spanish or English This is a hard rule for me to remember!

*Arezzo. The "zz"  is a strong "ts" sound.

*Cinigiano.  A real challenge!  The vowel "i" is changing both the "c" to a "ch" sound and the "g" to a sound like the beginning of "gem" in English.

*Magliano in Toscana.  The "gl" sound is close to the "ll" in the English "million."

*Pisa.  The "s" sound once again becomes "z" between vowels.

Well, that little exercise was not too painful.  Now I know to watch out for "c" and "g" followed by "i," double consonants, and "s" and "z" in certain word positions.

It's a start on acquiring as much of the Italian language as I can before this summer.  Arrivederci!