How to use this Page

Blessedly, some foods seem to have magical healing properties. When I left my family of origin, I needed to reconstruct some family traditions in order to reclaim them in an emotionally healthy way. One of the traditions that had to go was a big, fancy, mom-trapped-in-the- kitchen, crazy-making Christmas Eve meal. In the household where I am the mom, Christmas Eve dinner has always been pizza. It’s the one time of the year when no one has to share or compromise--everybody gets whatever toppings they want before Santa comes. Even if I wanted to change now, the kids wouldn’t let me. My children have always been pizza addicts, even as babies, and the last in line is the worst by far. Scarlett recently found the discarded lid to a banker’s box and, thinking that pizza was secretly being consumed without her, carried it around to each person in the house demanding to know where the “pee-zah” was. That’s how powerful the lure of the pie is. In Dayal Kaur Khalsa’s How Pizza Came To Queens, four little girls in the 1950s try to figure out what will make their sad Italian guest smile. She doesn’t speak English and they can only guess at what “pizza” (the one mournful word they can decipher) means. They even break down and visit the library, where they find the answer. They bring her the secret ingredients, she shows them the perfect toss, and they all spend the rest of the summer in pizza heaven.

In recent years, student enrollment in Italian courses seems to have gradually increased. Why study Italian?, you may ask yourself. Well, there are several reasons, depending on your interests.

• Italy is one of the top five economies in the world. An estimated 7,500 American companies do business with Italy and many have offices there.
  
• Knowing Italian is greatly beneficial in career fields like culinary arts, interior design, fashion, graphic design, furniture design, machine tool manufacturing, robotics, electromechanical machinery, shipbuilding, space engineering, construction machinery, and transportation equipment.
  
• Italy's cultural influence spans from antiquity through the present.
  
• Italian literature boasts some of the world's most famous writers and thinkers, from Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Machiavelli, to Verga, Pirandello, Ungaretti, and Gadda, to name a few. Knowing Italian allows you to understand, appreciate, and analyze this treasury of human expression.<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

• Books' organization allows teachers to follow any sequence suitable to the needs of students and the objectives of the course.
• Chapters are organized around related grammatical topics.
• Concise and clear explanations of grammar are followed by examples.
• Exercises are set in functional realistic contexts to provide meaningful practice.
• Many of the exercises are personalized to stimulate original student response and meaningful assimilation of concepts.
• Open-ended exercises provide students with the opportunity to express their personal opinions in Italian, within the scope of the concept under study.
• Italian-English Vocabulary is included.
• Appendixes contain model verb tables and rules of Italian punctuation, syllabication, and pronunciation.

Oh man, how did I not know that Italian cartoonist Gipi has a blog? Granted, it’s in Italian (natch) so I can’t read it, but it’s worth skimming through the various pages for the nice big scans of his comics, sketchbook pages, and bee-yoo-teeful watercolours.

Gipi’s comics, including Garage Band and Notes for a War Story (both translated into English), are among my favourites. His work gifts the reader with a sense of place and atmosphere unlike any other cartoonist’s work.

Several years ago I linked to a site featuring over 50 episodes of Osvaldo Cavandoli’s wonderful series of short animations, La Linea. That link has come and gone, but I did just find an extensive YouTube playlist of 78 La Linea episodes.

I loved watching these as a kid. You may recognize La Linea’s voice as Carlo Bonomi, the voice of Pingu.

By Anatoly Liberman

Linguists, historians, journalists, and well-meaning amateurs have offered various conjectures on the rise of the word ghetto, none of which has won universal approval. Even the information in our best dictionaries should be treated with caution, for not all of them contain the disclaimer that whatever is said there reflects the opinion of the editor (who has rarely studied the vast literature on the subject) rather than the ultimate truth. The only uncontroversial facts are that the first Jewish ghetto appeared in Venice in 1516 and that in the Pope’s bull of 1562 the enclosure assigned to the Jews in Rome was called ghectus. (In parentheses: the Jews were expelled from England in 1290. Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice around 1594; he never saw a Jew in his life. The drama is based on a widespread folklore plot of outsmarting the devil.)

Before turning to the etymology of ghetto, I would like to answer the question given in the title of this post. We don’t know whether ghetto is a Hebrew, Latin, Italian, or Yiddish word (in order not to complicate matters, I’ll refer to all the varieties of the Jewish language in the Diaspora as Yiddish, in contradistinction to Hebrew). In linguistic reconstruction, it is customary to move from the center of the enquiry to the periphery. Since the first ghetto was built in Venice, we should first look for the word’s origin in some Italian, preferably the Venetian, dialect. If this attempt fails, a Hebrew or Yiddish etymology should be tried. If we again draw blank, we will be bound to explore the vocabulary of some other language that could have influenced the coining of ghetto. Although this is a natural approach to reconstruction, it need not be confused with the natural order of things in language or anywhere in life. If I go from point A to point B, a straight line will be the shortest distance between them. But on my way I may meet a friend and go an extra mile with him, get cold and drop into a bar for a drink, or do any other unpredictable thing. Retracing my route according to the laws of geometry or logic is a dangerous enterprise. We expect an Italian origin of ghetto, but why shouldn’t the Jews have used their own word for the hateful enclosure, or why shouldn’t a foreign name for such a place have been used? After all, the word ghetto entered most European languages, including English, and it is a borrowing in all of them.

Reference books often cite the Hebrew noun get (pronounced approximately like Engl. get) “a bill or letter of divorce.” Allegedly, ghetto goes back to it and stands for “separation.” In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Jews believed that this is how the word came into being. But this connection seems to owe its existence to folk etymology, for a change from “a bill of divorce” to “a place of forced isolation” is hard to imagine. The Yiddish hypothesis makes much of ghectus understood as the Latinized form of gehektes “enclosed.” However, the spelling ghectus has little value for reconstruction. Since Latin ct became tt in Italian (compare Latin perfectus “perfect” and Italian perfetto), it was customary to give medieval Italian words a pseudo-Latin appearance. Finally, one of the oldest conjectures traces ghetto to the Latin neuter Giudaicetum “Jewish.” This etymology is indefensible from a phonetic point of view and from almost every other. The Hebrew-Yiddish search for the origin of ghetto should be abandoned.

While evaluating a dozen or so mutually conflicting theories, one should not be swayed by authority. Some of the least persuasive conjectures stem from the works of distinguished scholars. Such is the derivation of ghetto from Latin Aegyptus. The Jews were often looked upon as foreigners, but it is inconceivable that the Venetians trading with half of the world could have confused the Jews with Egyptians. Later the author of this derivation thought better of his proposal, but it found a safe haven in the most solid German dictionary and reemerged in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, a fact worthy of regret. Nor are the other suggestions, all of which have been given short shrift above, the products of ignorance. The same holds for the etymology that the OED chose for want of a better one, namely, ghetto as being the second half of the Italian word borghetto “little town.” Clipping is ubiquitous in English: doc, math, lab, and their likes are universally used words. A name can lose either its first or its last syllable: Fredrick is Fred for some and Rick for others. Suburbs shrank to burbs. In Italian, ghetto (or Ghetto) “district; street” exists despite the fact that this type of word formation is much less productive, but it has been applied to numerous places unrelated to the segregation of the Jews. It is not specific enough for our purposes. Italian, like French, has two e’s: open and closed (compare the pronunciation of Engl. man and men, though the difference between the Romance vowels is smaller than in English). This difference complicates the relation between ghetto and the suffix -etto. However, the question of phonetics can be passed over here. The Venetian ghetto had a wall built around it. Christian guards closed the gates at a certain hour, so that no one could enter or leave the place. From time to time Old French guect “guard” is pressed into service: the word resembles ghectum, mentioned above, and has been cited as the etymon (source) of ghetto. The supporters of the guet etymology did not explain why a French word was used for the designation of an Italian “institution.” Those are all fruitless guesses. To remain realistic, I think we should agree that the word from which ghetto was derived denoted a certain place. Borghetto does denote a place, but referring to it is a shot in the dark.

In Italian, the first sound of ghetto is identical with g- in Engl. get, and the spelling gh- makes the pronunciation clear. In older documents our word sometimes appears with initial g- and sometimes with gh-, but gratuitous variation is so typical of medieval and early modern texts, that no conclusions can be drawn from the coexistence of ghetto and getto. In all likelihood, the 16th century Italians pronounced ghetto as we do. The Spanish and Portuguese exiles could have used the form jetto. Yet even if they did, this circumstance is of no consequence for the etymology of ghetto. The gh-g difference is the main stumbling block in the etymology that traces ghetto to the Latin verb jactare “to throw (about)”: Latin j- would not have become g-. Jactare has been conjured up because the island where the Jews were made to live at one time supposedly had getti glossed as “foundries,” and ghetto, according to an often-repeated hypothesis, received its name from getto “foundry.” Despite many attempts this hypothesis has been unable to overcome the g- ~ gh- hurdle. Getto was certainly derived from gettare “to cast (metal),” an Italian continuation of jactare, but getto is not ghetto. One also wonders whether any area would have been called “foundry” rather than “foundries.” To make matters worse, there is no certainty that getto ever meant “foundry” in the Venetian dialect. A variant of the getto-ghetto etymology connects ghetto with Old Italian ghetta “protoxide of lead.” The reference is to the verb ghettare “to refine metal by means of ghetta.” The plot thickens without bringing us closer to the denouement.

At a certain moment, I decided that all the etymologies of ghetto are wrong and was pleased to find an ally in Harri Meier, a Romance scholar, who published an article on this question in 1972. He attempted to derive ghetto from Latin vitta “ribbon,” and I liked his suggestion no more than I did those of his predecessors, but I think he was right to abandon foundries, Egyptians, borghetto, and alloys and to look for the etymon in some word meaning “street.” All over Europe, one finds a nook called Jüdische Gass(e) or its translation into the local language, that is, “Jewish Street.” Gasse is a southern German form related to Icelandic and Swedish gata (Norwegian gate, Danish gade) “street”; for the regular ss ~ t alternation compare German Wasser and Engl. water. Gata is an obscure word. Its unquestionable Gothic cognate is gatwo, but the origin of w in it has not been explained (Gothic was recorded in the 4th century). By contrast, the similar-looking Engl. gate (originally, “opening”) should probably be separated from gatwo/gata. The speakers of Old Germanic did not have towns and, consequently, did not have streets. When they needed an equivalent of “street” in Greek or Latin, they resorted to borrowing or chose a native word meaning “area” (public space) or “market.”

Surprisingly, Latin jactare will now return to our narrative. Via French, English has jetty, a derivative of this verb. Enigmatic things happened in its history. All of a sudden it seems to have developed the variant jutty. No one has even tried to explain this change that lacks analogues. The verb jet is of the same origin. It too acquired the variant jut. Jutty is restricted to dialects, but jut out is a respectable form of Standard English. The meaning of jetty also poses problems. We are familiar with jetty “pier,” but in central and northern England it means “a passage between two houses” (per The English Dialect Dictionary by Joseph Wright). In 1882 a certain A. H. G. wrote in Notes and Queries: “In rambling about Warwickshire I found the name jetty locally applied to narrow thoroughfares consisting of ancient houses, just such quarters as Houndsditch [a street in the City of London], and which might be plausibly assigned to Jews in the Middle Ages. The edifices are quite old enough for this ascription, and it may be in the power of some readers of “N. & Q.” to say if jetty is a probable corruption of ghetto, or if it is correctly spelled and used as jetty in this sense.” 126 years after A. H. G.’s query appeared I want to respond to it. I suspect that in some parts of the Romance speaking world a slangy borrowing from Germanic existed, a word traceable to gata and meaning “street,” perhaps even “narrow street,” and that it had some currency in several forms, with initial g-, as in get, and with initial j-, as in jet, with the vowel a and with the vowel e, a common situation in slang. Ghetto will then emerge as an Italian variant of that word. I suspect that from the beginning it had a derogatory meaning (“poor, miserable quarters”), the right place for the exiled Venetian Jews. Folk etymology influenced the word more than once: some people remembered that in old days cannons had been made on the Jewish island, whereas the Jews associated ghetto with separation. If I am right, the regional English sense of jetty is the most ancient; “pier” came later. In history, jutty possibly predated jetty. “It may be in the power of some readers” of this blog to develop my idea or to refute it. Whatever the result, I will be overjoyed if we succeed in making even one step toward demystifying the intractable word ghetto.

No, this is not going to be a tirade against languages other than English. Being a native Spanish speaker myself, I’m not against any foreign language (with the exception of Klingon and Esperanto). I actually enjoy learning them.

It’s only that in the last couple of years “foreign languages” have morphed into “world languages,” not unlike “used cars” have become “certified pre-owned vehicles.” Most schools, universities, and publishing companies don’t have foreign language departments anymore, but world languages departments. Apparently, the word “foreign” has become politically incorrect too. (Not to say that I give any credence to political correctness.)

A long time ago, I spent a summer studying Italian literature at the Università degli Studi d’Urbino. English, German, and Spanish language courses—among others—were part of the Facoltà di lingue straniere (Department of Foreign Languages), mainly because it was no secret that Italian was the predominant language in the country. I don’t recall any foreigners or immigrants being emotionally damaged by that. In fact, one of the most popular places to learn Italian was the Università per Stranieri di Perugia (University for Foreigners in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Perugia). Somehow, people seemed to be cool with that.

This moral imperative of “not offending” that we currently experience seems to reflect a sense of pessimism regarding people’s emotional resilience. Let’s face it: with famine, wars, and natural disasters, if your worst grievance at the end of the day is having been offended, then your life is hardly a Greek tragedy. Just toughen up a little.

Eventually, we too will have a World Languages Department. No big deal. It’s encouraging though, that the Università per Stranieri di Perugia hasn’t changed its name, nor are there plans to do so.

I went to Bath from Bristol. Was trapped in a one way system by the taxi's GPS system and a taxi driver who seemed oblivious to the fact that the GPS system was taking him around and around the centre of Bath in repeating circles, but who was determined to obey his GPS orders anyway and thus ignored all the diversion signs that would have taken him where he needed to go.

But we got there. I printed stuff out. All was ready.

I came on in a huge thingummy of dry ice smoke that rolled across the stage and then lurched into the foggy darkness of what I could only imagine was an audience. You couldn't see much through the smoke but you could hear a few people coughing. It gave me hope.

Then I sat down and read some of the first chapter of "The Graveyard Book", and a little bit of "Odd and the Frost Giants", and then I answered questions. I'd made a promise to myself to try and answer as many questions as I could completely newly, ever since someone in Lund came up to me and said "I was answering along with you, word for word on that" (I think it was my reply to "How Did You And Terry Pratchett Write Good Omens?"). It meant I was a bit more hesitant and probably less funny, but, I hope, a bit more honest-in-terms-of-exactly-how-I-think-of-something-right-now.

They'd advertised the event as "12+ and adult" which meant that we got a mostly adult turnout of about 450 people. The signing went fast and everyone was really nice.

After, Bloomsbury publicist the magnificently pregnant Lucy Holden and I were meant to get the train back to London, but it was first delayed and then, eventually, cancelled, so we bit the bullet and got a taxi all the way from Bath railway station to London.

Stumbled back into my hotel very late and then couldn't sleep until early.


Dear Mr. Gaiman
I am very curious to know what the word "neepery" means. I looked up some of the dictionary's at home and came up with nothing. So i tried the internet and those dictionaries seemed to have nothing, except something about some physic's equation. Which has made my head spin and forced me to lie down, so strange it was. So i tried to just Google neepery and that has lead me to some other writers that write "neepery" and the context its used in didn't help me much. Will you please divulge on this young boys mind the meaning of the word neepery!!
Many Thanks
Sam
P.S. My best friend thinks that you made the word up, just to make yourself look cooler.

I have made many words up in my time, but that wasn't one of them. A quick Google gave me...
http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/neep-neep.html

neep-neep: /neep neep/, n.
[onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers. Less specific than hacker, as it need not imply more skill than is required to play games on a PC. The derived noun neeping applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use). Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that “Hacking is a conversational black hole!”.

Hope this helps.

The event with Susanna Clarke was lovely, except for the, oh, 45 minutes or thereabouts that all 250 of us spent standing outside on the pavement in the cold, waiting for the fire brigade to establish that the problems in the nanotech lab next door were a false alarm.

I was asked tonight who'd win in a fight -- probably a no holds barred cage match, I suspect -- between me and Bill Gibson. I said me, but my daughter Holly, who was there, just laughed at me afterwards and said she couldn't imagine me fighting anyone. Holly says that Me vs Bill Gibson would be like a fight between a baby bunny and a duckling, and she is probably right.

I'm still really jet-lagged. I feel as if the going-to-Japan and the coming-back-from-Japan crash came at the same time -- just had a completely failed conversation with my agent, who soon figured out that the communication things simply wasn't happening, and told me to call him back tomorrow.

...

If you're in the UK, remember that next Tuesday, Oct 2nd is the big event at the Criterion:

Tuesday 02 October 07 Event 422 at 18:00

Neil Gaiman in conversation

Featuring: Neil Gaiman

Exclusive event-only book signing afterwards, at Waterstone's Piccadilly

Don't miss this one-off London appearance by one of the world’s greatest imaginative minds, and author of many bestselling novels, including American Gods, Anansi Boys, and the cult novel Stardust . The film of Stardust, directed by Matthew Vaughan and starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Ricky Gervais, Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro, premieres in London on Wednesday 3 October at Odeon Leicester Square. We have a pair of tickets to the premiere: all ticket-holders to the event will be entered into a draw and the winner will be announced after the performance.

Price: £5.00

Venue: Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly http://www.criterion-theatre.co.uk/

http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/browse.aspx?type=date&value=02-Oct-2007

About to leave for Japan -- but I thought I would post information on the OTHER UK signing that isn't the 2nd of October London one, before I leave. In Bristol,

WATERSTONE'S BRISTOL GALLERIES
Friday, 28 September 2007, 1:00PM

Saturday 29th September
J19 6 – 7pm, The Forum, £5
World famous for his Sandman graphic novel series, and
acclaimed as a children’s author for his novel Coraline, and his picture books which include The Wolves in the Walls and The day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish, Neil Gaiman is one of today’s great cult writers. In this book festival exclusive, Neil Gaiman travels from America to talk about his writing, his films and some of the many influences on his incredible imagination.

Supported by Bloomsbury Children’s Books

There's a lot of travel coming up, some of it Stardust or Beowulf related. But I thought I should start to put some of it down here. I just realised that the stuff I've put up recently over in the Where's Neil blog hasn't posted, and I haven't been updating the Google Calendar thingie, so we need to untangle that. But for now...

I'll be at the Chengdu international conference on science fiction at the end of August. I wish I could go from there to Worldcon in Japan but it doesn't seem likely. I'll be flying from there to Budapest and from there to Italy...

(Googling the Chengdu festival, I found this fascinating article on SF in China -- parts one, two and three. We learn that In the early eighties, the Party considered Sci-fi an evil, which could lead the public astray. All sci-fi writing across China ceased. The magazine Science Fiction World was the only survivor of the crackdown. But that things change..."Sci-Fi writing is now supported by Chinese government as it is considered to be a genre that can inspire the whole nation's ability to think imaginatively and popularizes science nationwide, " Yao Haijun, the editor of Science Fiction World magazine, said.)

I'll be at the Mantova (Mantua) Literary Festival on the 7th and 8th of September (I just found some details at http://www.neilgaimania.it/html/view2.php?id=32&nomedb=articoli).

I'll be in the UK at the end of September: The Bath Children's Literary Festival. (Bath as in the beautiful town, not as in a festival dedicated to literature about bathing children. My event is http://www.bathkidslitfest.co.uk/event_J19.htm) There will be an evening reading and Q&A that may also be a signing on Tuesday the 2nd of October. Then the UK Stardust premiere in Leicester Square on the 3rd of October.

I learned this morning that there may be a trip to Sweden and one to Japan in there, but I don't have details and confirmation yet. And probably more to come. (Actually, there is definitely more to come.)

...

I'd promised myself I wouldn't keep linking to Stardust reviews but then I learned that " This summer, Hollywood will release a romantic fantasy adventure movie again, its likes a long time we never seen this genre made by Hollywood. " And I'm still wondering if the review was translated from another language, or if there was some awful compositing accident in which the words were dropped and jumbled, or if the person who wrote it uses English in their own way. Either way it's very charming, if rather odd.

A more normal one is http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2007/08/02/LifeArts/A.Modern.Fairy.Tale.To.Enchant.Us.All-2929151.shtml which concludes by saying, To say that "Stardust" bears some similarities to "The Princess Bride" would be fair. This movie measures very favorably against that earlier classic and is the best young adult oriented "modern" fairy tale since. It truly is "The Princess Bride" for this generation. Which is nice. I've tried to explain to interviewers that, no, I don't think it has much in common with The Princess Bride, they're at present the only two things in that genre.

James Vance, is a fine writer and an old friend who has a terrific blog over at http://www.james-vance.com/jvblog/. He's done an interview with me about Stardust at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=070804_8_H6_spanc37312 where he asks a few different questions and, as a result, gets some different answers.

And here's the San Francisco Chronicle -- http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/05/PK27RB3233.DTL&type=movies -- which begins "That disturbance in the universe you may have felt is the potentially unholy alliance between Hollywood and Neil Gaiman..."
...

Dear Neil ,You do sound a little grumpy.Here's one more thing that might - I hope - put a smile back on your face:
http://dailymotion.alice.it/video/x2aj1j_a-gentlemens-duel_shortfilms
Don't miss out on it, it's wonderful. Greetings from Rome.
Nathalie

You know, oddly enough, I saw this a few weeks ago -- Francisco Ruiz, who made it, was one of the storyboard artists on Hellboy 2, and we shared a bus in to the studio each morning, and when he went back to the US he left me a DVD. Which proves there really are only 500 real people in the world and they all know each other. Or just that the world is a very small place indeed.