On Aug 27, 2004, at 2:39 AM, Giovanni Andreani wrote:
Well, there's a lot to say here, and I'll obviously cover one minimum percentage of the aspect. [snip]
Thanks for the follow up, Giovanni. And I trust you won't be shy about correcting me when I do get something wrong!
In the opera world part of my job is to help singers really understand what they're saying, so I've had to immerse myself in the nuances of Italian many times, but I'm not a native speaker and I'm really not even fluent in any practical sense, so I welcome whatever help I can get.
It seems to me that there are two issues here. One is that when a word is used in a specific context, it develops a specialty meaning there. So a word used as a musical term develops a special meaning in music which is different from the general meaning. When the word comes from another language -- as legato, allegro, etc, do for us anglophones -- we're only aware of the specialty meaning. If we make ourselves aware of the general meaning as well, it might provide interesting historical background, but it's really no longer the musical term that we're studying.
In the term's native language, speakers simply learn to distinguish the specialty meaning from the general meaning, but as you note, that sometimes leads to temporary confusion when the person is learning the specialty for the first time. We have some of those in English as well, though we aren't conscious of them in the same way that we're conscious of Italian-derived terms. A good example is "swing". When we say a piece should be played with swing, "swing" is a specialty term whose meaning is only loosely related to the general meaning of the word. If a novice musician were to look up "swing" in the dictionary, it wouldn't be very helpful in learning what the composer is asking for.
The second factor at work here is just the general pattern of modulation between languages. That is, even when a word in one language has a corresponding equivalent in another language, it's never an exact match -- not even if the two words share the same etymological cognate. So while it may be true that "lento" equals "slow", your word might not suggest the same measure of slowness that our word does. And as you noted, there is modulation across time as well as across languages.
This can affect any descriptive word, and not just music. Modulation is most pronounced in subjective concepts with unclear boundaries, such as color. Everyone knows that "rosso" equals "red", but an anglophone who happens to see an Italian chart of colors with labels identifying the different hues will be quite surprised at the oranges and browns which Italians consider a shade of "rosso" that we would never think of as red. (This too modulates over time, by the way.) This also expresses itself in idiom. In English, we would think it very strange to refer to the yolk of an egg as the egg's "red" part.
One place where this question recurs in opera is in translating the scene in Tosca where Tosca insists that Mario put "occhi neri" on the portrait he's painting. We all know that "nero" equals "black", but in fact when referring to eyes "nero" suggests something which is darker than our "brown" but lighter than our "black". This inevitably leads to a debate about exactly what word one should use in writing the supertitles. Neither "black" nor "brown" is truly an accurate representation. Some choose to dodge the issue by saying "dark", but that doesn't quite capture it either.
A similar problem exists for words for hair color. Among those who care about the ethnic identity of the various groups of ancient Greeks, there is a lively debate about exactly what can be inferred from the hair color words found in the Iliad. (The confusion is further compounded by amateurs who drawn erroneous conclusions based on translations which were never intended to be literal. -- "It says right here that Helen was 'fair-haired'...!")
mdl
P.S. to Giovanni: Can I add you to my list of advisors for occasions when I want insight from a native speaker on the use of certain Italian words? I can think of one puzzle I want to pose already.
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