For some years now, Italian society has begun to change at an accelerated pace, and things that were previously socially taboo are now being done in the light of the sun. With the usual contradictions: there are those who are indignant at certain demonstrations and promise to protect young people, the latter stay hours on Instagram to discuss equality and rights. With some effect also on the tongue.
And it is an effect that has opened a not exactly irrelevant debate and that goes to the heart of an issue that is affecting all linguistic fields, that of language reform to take it in the direction of inclusiveness.
goWare is pleased to propose a new interesting contribution from the glottologist Daniele Vitali who turns his attention to this issue and discusses the various proposals that have emerged to begin moving written and spoken language within the terrain of inclusiveness. This first contribution will be followed by a second next Sunday.
It happens on social media
We are well aware that disinformation agents rage on social networks with their armies of trolls, but we also know that such networks can serve to exchange ideas for positive change, with visible effects on the attitude of the younger generations towards diversity. Naturally, it is an impetuous process, in which many things happen, and it is said that not everyone always finds themselves in it, also because at times it seems to enter a parallel world with its initiatory language.
Thus we have body shaming and body positivity, cat calling and survivors, incels and hikikomoris, gender fluids and cis males, ageism and patriarchy, up to those who write “car* all*” or “carə tuttiə” to indicate the coexistence of the two sexes, i.e. to signal that it is addressing both men and women at the same time.
How is it right in the plural?
According to them, saying or writing "dear all", i.e. using a formulation that sounds masculine to indicate an audience that could also be mixed, would be sexist: in fact, the use of this "overextended plural" or "generalized", or "promiscuous" would exclude women, thus perpetuating the patriarchal domination of one sex over the other.
In August 2021, a public figure like Michela Murgia he started using the vowel ə according to a manifest ideal for which the language should be modified at the table in order to reflect modern times and, listen, change mentalities.
Various reactions followed, such as the practice of Flavia Brother and the witty and intelligent one of Robert Mercadini.
In the meantime, the question has passed a bit of topicality but, although it is now clear that it will not be the asterisk and the o schwa to break through the glass ceiling by crumbling the patriarchy, it is worth dwelling on the question, since it calls into question some fundamental principles of inclusive or politically correct language. The latter, contrary to certain fashions, has come to stay, or so it is hoped.
From asterisk to schwa
Let's start fromasterisk. I don't know if you are capable of following a text like "Car* friend*, I present to you * our* very good* artist*: acrobat*, trapeze artist*, actor* and musician* who will take you back to when you were a child*, schoolboy* and student*”, but I'd be pretty sure you don't know how to deliver such a speech aloud. And this, I would say, closes the question: being most of our verbal interactions of an oral type, and not written, an inclusive language that cannot be used orally does not seem to be of excessive use.
Moving on to schwa, first of all it will be explained what it is: a concept well known to those involved in phonetics, it was in fact completely unknown to the general public, so much so that Flavia Fratello herself in the video recommended above calls it "sciùa" /'ʃua/.
Well no: it is said schwa /ʃ'wa/ or /ʃ'va/, once Italianized in scevà /ʃe'va/, and it is the name of a letter of the Hebrew alphabet which, at the dawn of linguistics, was used to indicate a mid-opening central vowel.
As the description says, not being an open vowel like a, closed like i and u, front like i and e nor back like u and o, it practically configures an "intermediate vowel" completely absent from Italian, which has only seven phonemes all peripheral vowels (7 and not 5 as in the spelling, because e, o can be open or closed: the vowel phonemes of Italian are therefore /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u/).
Today this sound is indicated with the symbol [ə] of theInternational Phonetic Alphabet and there is no longer any need to write schwa, scevà or "intermediate vowel" or "indistinct" but, precisely because written communication must be made oral where necessary, whoever wants to name the sound can still speak of schwa, it being understood which does not refer to the Hebrew letter but to the mid-opening central vowel.
From English to Neapolitan
The fact that there was talk of schwa even before the debate on the equal language it is due to the presence of the sound [ə] in other languages: for example, English has two "schwa-type sounds", namely the short /ə/ [ə], unstressed, which we find in about /ə'baʊt / “about”, and the shorter and longer one /ə:/ [ɜ:], accented, which is used in British English to say bird /'bə:d/ ['bɜ:d] “bird” (not so in USA, where it is pronounced ['bɹ:d] with syllabic r).
The sound [ə] is also present in many dialects, including Neapolitan, which pronounces all word-final unstressed vowels in the same way. In practice, where Italian has 4 possible unstressed final vowels (/i, e, a, o/, because /u/ does not exist in that position), the Neapolitan it has only one: to the Italian “gatti, gatte, gatta, gatto” corresponds in Neapolitan dialect always and only /'gattə/.
I realized it as a kid, following on television the films taken from the book "Così parlò Bellavista" by Luciano De Crescenzo, and therefore I thought it was a well-known notion, until I saw the writing BERLUSCO' MAGNT O CAZZ on a wall in Naples. It seems that the anonymous extender of the Boccaccio invitation, besides not being a fervent admirer of the Cavaliere, didn't even hold the schwa in high esteem: in fact, if I had ever thought of daubing a wall, I would rather have written BBERLUSCO' , MÀGGNƏTƏ OR FUCKƏ.
The dangerous relationships between spelling and phonology
Why is this happening? How is it that the best-known dialect that has /ə/ is written by speakers as if it had no unstressed vowels? Here a question that is no longer phonetic but "psycho-phonological" comes into play, which concerns the way in which speakers conceive language.
The sound /ə/ is not part of the Italian phonetic and phonological system, so there is no letter to write it. Now, many dialects are written only with the signs used in Italian, so those with schwa are faced with quite a problem.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Eduardo De Filippo he decided to write cats, cats, cat, cat as in Italian, leaving the correct pronunciation to the Neapolitan reader. This could only work in dialect-speaking environments accustomed to the written use of dialect, and it is for this reason that it no longer works today: unable to write as in Italian because otherwise they would not be writing in Neapolitan, and not being able to resort to a special sign for lack of technical skills, today's speakers use the apostrophe or nothing at all. In linguistics we would say that they "use a zero grapheme".
The future of the schwa
This fact, given the dependence on handwriting that most of the population has when it comes to reasoning about Pronounce, causes the average Neapolitan to be unaware of having /ə/ in his own language: the grapheme zero is believed to be phoneme zero. I can prove this affirmation through a meme that I saw last year on Facebook precisely coinciding with the national debate on the opportunity to use schwa in Italian in order to make it less sexist: with these premises, given that not even those who can pronounce the schwa understands its distribution, it does not seem that our equal letter is headed towards a bright future. But there are other points of perplexity. For example, since the schwa in Neapolitan is also used in the singular, while in Italian it is never used, using it to indicate the coexistence of the sexes would not be speaking Neapolitan and it would not be speaking Italian.
. . .
Daniele Vitali, from Bologna, was a translator for the European Commission for years. He has to his credit various glottology works on languages and dialects, including “Linguistic portraits: the Romanian” (Inter @ lia 2002), “Do you speak Italian-Luxembourgish? Notes on the language of the Italians of Luxembourg” (Inter@lia 2009), “Russian pronunciation for Italians” (with Luciano Canepari, Aracne 2013), as well as the great “Dizionario Bolognese-Italiano Italiano-Bolognese” (Pendragon 2007 and 2009, with Luigi Lepri), “Emilian dialects and Tuscan dialects. Linguistic interactions between Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany” (Pendragon 2020) and “Mé a dscårr in bulgnaiṡ. Manual for learning the Bolognese dialect” (Pendragon 2022).
