Another citizen who regrets that his parents and grandparents didn't teach him their language when he was young. DP
By Charles Paolino
thnt.com: A reader points out that the Italian term for garlic is aglio, not alia, as I wrote in this space last week. My bad.
I've seen spaghetti aglio e olio on enough menus that I should know how to spell it.
The combination gli occurs frequently in Italian. The g is silent — or nearly so. I remember my Italian professor at Seton Hall explaining the pronunciation of figlia, which is the Italian term for daughter, by saying that one starts to pronounce the g, but doesn't follow through, so there is only a slight contraction of the throat before the l.
Let's just say the g is silent, and leave it at that. Aglio e olio is difficult enough to pronounce as it is.
When my grandparents used that phrase, they ran it together as though it were one word. I was in my late teens before I knew what they were saying — though I sure knew what they meant by it, and was in heaven whenever it was on the dinner table.
Unfortunately for me, they never attempted to teach me things like that.
People today who are annoyed by immigrants who stick to their native tongues would have liked my grandparents. They spoke to each other in Italian, but they used English most of the time, and occasionally pointed out that they were "Americans now."
Fair enough. But it didn't occur to my grandparents — or to me, for that matter — that they would have done me a favor by teaching me a second language while I was young.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
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