Speech patterns

Feeling momentarily cultured, I dropped a few lines of opera in a recent post, forgetting that 18th-century Italian isn't necessarily a lingua franca. One reader, bless her heart, asked for a translation, and I was happy to oblige - and will try to be more democratic in the future. While we're on the subject of difficulties in understanding sung Italian, though, let's push at least one step further. It's worth noting that one of the complexities in comprehending spoken Italian is the relatively common use of contractions - that is, of dropped letters. Because Italian words often begin and end in vowels, one's often faced with consecutive vowels, and since Italian, like many languages, tends to simplify or collapse adjacent combinations of vowels, one ends up with a number of spots in which one vowel is simply omitted, for reasons of fluidity and ease.

Take, for instance, a portion of Cherubino's aria in Act 1, Scene 6 of Le Nozze di Figaro. He sings of love, and wants to say that he speaks of it when he is awake, and asleep. Parlo, he intends to claim, di amore vegliando. But that i-a combination in the middle is a touch awkward, and so it's simplified, or contracted, and becomes d'amore; at the same time, the final -e of amore is also undesirable, in the rhythmic structure of the song, and so it's merely dropped. And the rest of the sentence features further examples of the same idea:

Parlo d'amor vegliando,
parlo d'amor sogliando,
all'acque, all'ombre, ai monti...

But don't blame the Italians. After all, we do it, too. Note the similar contraction, in the English translation:

I speak of love when I'm awake,
I speak of it in my dreams,
to the stream, the shadows, the mountains.

I am becomes I'm.

Cleo's learning to contract, too, in a halting, lurching fashion; she'll sometimes announce that "That's Cleo's." But she also contracts in less conventional ways, as well, for apparent reasons of ease. For instance, it's not too difficult to voice words that begin with s and a vowel, and Cleo often speaks easily of our sofa, or crying babies who appear to be sad. But an opening s that is followed by a consonant is trickier, and Cleo often deals with that combination by simply dropping the s-. So stool is tool, and sometimes she asks to tand on that tool. Point to her belly, and she'll identify her tomach.

Such a tendency can make Cleo-speak a little opaque to the outsider's ear. But, viewed in the right context, it has an impeccable logic of its own. After all, it's the same logic that's governed singers playing the role of Cherubino, for centuries.