Loredana Cerrato Modified Standard Orthography for Italian
Italian orthography does not allow for alternative spelling of the same word.
There are no similar cases as in Swedish ”roligt or rolig”, ”veskor or vesker”.
Reduction phenomena
Some vocalic reduction phenomena are reported and standardized in Italian orthography (the
phenomenon is known as “elisione”).
1) articles and their relative articulated preposition drop their final vowel when followed by a
word starting with an unstressed vowel, this phenomenon is marked with an apostrophe in
standard orthography:
lo oro> l’ oro
nello oro> nell’ oro
2) The singular form of the demostrative adjectives (questo, questa, quello, quella) and the
adjectives “bello” and “santo” also undergo the same reduction phenomenon:
questa amica> quest’amica
quello oggetto>quell’oggetto
bello uomo> bell’uomo
santo Antonio >sant’Antonio
3)In some idiomatic expressions vowel reduction also occur:
“ a quattro occhi > a quattr’ occhi” (which means something like face to face).
4) Monosyllabic words like the particle-pronouns “mi, ti ci vi” and so on, drop their vowel if
followed by a word starting with the same vowel in unstressed position:
mi importa > m’importa
but not in the case when the pronoun is stressed or when the vowel in the following word is
stressed : “ho detto che non MI importa”.
For the above mentioned cases it would be superfluous to adopt the MSO convention of curly
parenthesis for vowel reductions, that is quest{a} amica, because the phenomenon is
systematic and reported in the standard orthography.
However there are some cases of reduction in spoken language, which are not standardised in
the orthography, for instance
1) final unstressed vowels are reduced to schwa
2) adjacent vowels at word boundaries can be produced as a monophthong:
andare avanti > andaravanti
amico americano>amicamericano
In these cases could be useful to annotate the reduction with the MSO convention of curly
parenthesis:
andare avanti > andar{e}avanti
Another reduction phenomena is the deletion of a total syllable (“apocope”) in adjectives like:
grande > gran
and in substantives used as titles preceding a proper name:
Signore >signor Rossi
Dottore>dottor Rossi
Ingenere> Ingegner Rossi
These cases are standardised in the orthography, but there are some cases of regional variants
which are not accepted in the orthography.
One common phenomenon is the deletion of the last syllable in the infinitive form of verbs in
the regional variant of“Lazio” (the area around Rome).
Mettere > mette’
Correre > corre’
In these cases could be useful to annotate the reduction with the MSO convention of curly
parenthesis:
Mette{re}
Insertion phenomena
In Italian we also can have insertion of consonants and vowels .
1) Consonant insertion:
A well-known phenomenon in spoken Italian is called “syntactic reduplication”, it consists in
the reduplication of a consonant in some specific syntactic contexts.
This phenomenon differs inn different regional variants:
“vado a Roma” is pronounced /vada’r:oma/ in the South of Italy and /vada’roma/ in the
central regions.
2) Vowel insertion:
the majority of Italian words end with a vowel, there are very few words ending in consonant
(they are usually originally foreign words) for this reasons Italian people “are not used” to
pronounce a final consonant therefore they tend to add a vocalic sound to it (usually a schwa):
club /klebb@/
In the MSO for Swedish there is not a convention for insertions.
I would suggest the following convention: write in the curly parenthesis the inserted sound
preceded by a +, for instance in the case of club club pronounced as /klebb@/, the MSO
would be: club{+b@}
Substitution phenomena
Substitutions are never reported in Italian orthography. Even if they occur in the different
regional variants. For instance in the area around Bologna they use a palatilised fricative
instead of s, but this is not standardised in the orthography1.
Another common phenomenon is the alternation between the voiced and unvoiced
pronunciation of the Italian dental and postalveolar affricates, which means that the same
orthographic word could be pronounced in several different ways, for instance the word
autorizzazione:
autorizzazione\1: a u t o r i ddz a tts j o n e
autorizzazione\2: a u t o r i ddz a ddz j o n e
autorizzazione\3: a u t o r i ts a ss j o n e
autorizzazione\4: a u t o r i ddz a ts j o n e
Another phenomenon is the insertion of a semivowel in some Southern pronunciations; this is
the case of words like cielo and scienze, whith an orthographic “i”, which should not be
pronounced, the standard pronunciation should be in fact [S E n ts e], however it is
pronounced as /S j E n ts e/.
1
In some cases writers or journalists try to report in the orthography some characteristics of a regional
pronunciation, and they do so by finding a special convention. In the case of the Bolognese ”s” I have sometimes
seen them written like ”sh”.
What to do in these cases?
It might be worthy to annotate this kind of regional phenomena if there is the need to
characterise the speaker on the base of his/her regional variant, and to do so the use of
numerical indexes would help:
scienze\1: S e n ts e
scienze\2: S j e n ts e
scienze\3: s j e n ts e
scienze\4: S j e n dz e
scienze\5: S e n dz e
On the transcription of foreign words.
In Italian the general rule is that for the orthography is kept the original form, but as
concerning the pronunciation the words are pronunced either according to Italian phonology
or to the degree of foreign knowledge of the speaker.
In this case it might be useful to have an disambiguation by means of numerical indexes, in
order to list the possible pronunciation. For instance the word
bancomat is spelt as bancomat, but it can be pronounced in different ways depending on the
regional variant used by the speaker:
"standard variant" bancomat\1: b a n k o m a t
"Southern variant" bancomat\2: b a n g o m a t
Remarks on punctuation and capital letters.
Punctuation and capital letters are not reported in the MSO transcription.
One main problems with Italian orthography (and English) is the extensive use of
apostrophe. In Italian orthography lots of articles, adjectives, nouns can be written in their
reduced forms with the apostrophe that indicated the dropping of the grapheme (as we have
see: l’oro, quest’ amico ecc.) so not allowing the use of the apostrophe would create lots of
problems in the transcription of Italian.
As concerning capital letters, in Italian orthography the difference between a proper name
and a common name can be inferred by initial capital letter.
Moreover all Acronyms are written with capital letters, but the could be written
extensively, for instance KTH could be orthographically transcribed as “kappatiacca”.