READY AL KN U O O W Y Italian Learn Italian by speaking English with 5,000 Italian words and frasi that are nearly identico to English RAYMOND W. LOWRY Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data- base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 0-07-148713-1 The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: 0-07-146489-1. All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Where such designations appear in this book, they have been printed with initial caps. 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DOI: 10.1036/0071464891 For more information about this title, click here CONTENTS This Book’s Purpose and Promise v How to Use This Book to Best Advantage viii Italian Pronunciation 1 Italian Grammar 19 Lista di termini e frasi familiari (List of Familiar Terms and Phrases) 31 Lista di termini identici e simili (List of Identical and Similar Terms) 43 Lista di termini “simili falsi” (List of “Falsely Similar” Terms) 261 Lista di termini e frasi utili (List of Helpful Terms and Phrases) 283 iii This page intentionally left blank THIS BOOK’S PURPOSE AND PROMISE An Important Note to Self-Directed Learners he thesis that underlies this volume’s title is simply stated: unless you’ve spent your life building sand castles, lazily watching the Tclouds roll by, or otherwise not paying much attention to the world around you, you already—perhaps without being conscious of the fact—possess an essential familiarity with the Italian language. Indeed, you already employ a significant number of Italian terms in your everyday speech and understand many more. For in fact, modern English is heavily interlaced with Italian terminology: words that are often incorrectly assumed to be English, while in fact they’ve been Italian—or, originally, Latin—from the start, drawn into our polyglot tongue by over two millennia of cultural interchange. If you doubt that assertion, it will be demonstrated momentarily. The purpose of this book is to assist you in readily adding to that preexisting base of acquaintance. To help you, in short, learn more Italian, faster and more thoroughly and confidently, than you have believed possible. And give you a basic working knowledge of the structure and syntax of Italian as well. It’s probably safe to assume that your interest in broadening your Italian vocabulary arises at least in part from the fact that you’re an involved and enthused citizen of our increasingly multicultural world. That is, an individual who has read and been fascinated by, among oth- ers, books with Italian settings, subjects, or motifs; an individual who has enjoyed Italian or Italian-themed or -sited films; who has been con- fronted with Italian menus and reveled in the cuisine offered there; who v Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use. has at least some acquaintance with popular and / or “serious” Italian music, art, and architecture; and knows at least a bit about Italy’s all- important contribution to Western history and culture. And very possi- bly you have an urge to travel to bella Italia—or perhaps have already been there, and long to return to that lovely land and really converse with its natives in their own lilting tongue. If that assumption is correct, then this book’s assertive title is almost certainly true: you do already own a larger Italian vocabulary than you’ve imagined, and are especially well positioned to advance more quickly and easily toward a growing mastery of la lingua italiana than you’ve supposed. Here’s the promised demonstration: you do recognize and understand at least a majority of the following words, don’t you?— amore, antipasto, bambino, bravo, carne, casa, casino, cinema, diva, falsetto, inferno, latte, mafia, mamma, numero, oro, olivo, paradiso, pasta, papà, pizza, prosciutto, quasi, radio, salsa, soprano, terra ferma, vendetta, veranda, vino. If your answer is in the affirmative, then you’re almost certainly well acquainted with a large fraction of the 200-plus words contained in this book’s initial word list, Lista di termini e frasi familiari (List of Familiar Terms and Phrases), and truly possess a mean- ingful “head start” in the relatively painless task of building an even more comprehensive Italian vocabulary. “Relatively painless?” Well, yes! For this book’s unique fea- ture is its primary focus on cognate English-Italian terminology. That is, words that are either spelled and / or pronounced identically, almost-identically, or with a high degree of similarity in both lan- guages. An English ambulance, for example, is an Italian ambulan- za; the English term abbreviation equates to abbreviazione in Italian; and if you’ve suffered an abrasion in New York, your abrasione is no more bothersome than it’d be in Roma. In short, cognates are far eas- ier to master than same-meaning words that bear little or no resem- blance to one another—and there are literally thousands of English / Italian cognates that can be readily incorporated into your basic Italian vocabulary! Many important terms contain no similarity at all across the linguistic divide, of course, and, eventually, many of them will be important for you to learn as well. But they will be far more vi YOU ALREADY KNOW ITALIAN easily and eagerly mastered once you’ve got a few hundred cognates securely stowed away in your mental bilingual lexicon. In short, this book’s approach is to work from easy to not so easy, rather than the other way around. Here, we want to start you off fast, and let your already possessed and easily broadened vocabulary serve as a base for the more difficult words and grammatical structures that, in time, will round out your learning. If that sounds like a fair and attrac- tive proposition, fellow learner . well, read on! And welcome to the world of easiest-to-master conversational Italian! This Book’s Purpose and Promise vii HOW TO USE THIS BOOK TO BEST ADVANTAGE xcept for the few who are blessed with inborn linguistic superskill, no foreign tongue is truly “easy” to learn: all are as complex and Einternally inconsistent as we humans who invented them. Relatively speaking, however, Italian is by far the easiest of all non- native languages for an English speaker to master. Not only does it have a structural logic less replete with exceptions and self-contradictions than most, but it’s full to overflowing with cognates: words that are identical or highly similar across the linguistic divide. This is the great- est advantage that any learner of Italian possesses: he or she can amass a relatively vast vocabulary—the essential foundation of language acquisition—with less arduous effort than is required for any other tongue! Indeed, most English speakers already know between scores and hundreds of Italian words.