Learning two languages at the same time has not been an easy process, with two different grammars and sound systems trying their best to stay apart in the left hemisphere. I found myself recalling Persian words in Italian and vice versa, and even mixing words such as ’17’ would be seven in Persian and teen in Italian, although this did lighten the mood in the class and made fellow students smile.
Italian language classes are coming to a close. After having submitted my assessments I am able to sit back and reflect on what I have learnt. I left the session at 8.30pm the other day with other students also feeling a little emotional: we have after all spent nearly a year in the same sessions, our paths having converged during our journeys for one academic year. We have different reasons for wanting to learn Italian but ultimately we all have a passion for languages and are interested in the diversity among people and their cultures. For some of us it has been fairly easy but for others it has been tricky. I have found the grammar difficult to get to grips with but eventually all becomes clear with practice.
During the course I have kept a list of words in the back of my notebook which brings together similar words or phrases between Italian, Urdu and Panjabi. I was not too surprised to see so many similarities, having been taught the history of language as an undergraduate I was already aware of the family of Indo-European languages but now I simply had more insight into the kind of pairs of words that emerge and echo each other.
Every time I heard a word that sounded like one I already used in my mother tongues I would write it down and soon the list spilled onto the next page. I’m sure there are many more words to list and this is far from exhaustive, but here are the ones I discovered that echo with Urdu (U) and Panjabi (P):
‘You’: tu (I) tu (P) tum (U)
‘Correct’: giusto (I) drust (U)
‘Key’: chiave (I) chaabi (P) chaabi (U)
‘what?’: che (I) ki (P) kya (U)
‘today’: oggi (I) ajj (P) aaj (U)
‘eye’: occhio (I) akkh (P) aankh (U)
‘nail’: ungie (I) [(‘finger’: ungli (P/U)]
‘(I am) sleepy’: sonno (I) [(‘sleeping’: soana (P/U)]
‘when?’: quando (I) qaddu (P) qabb (U)
‘stop/enough’: basta (I) bass (P) bass (U)
‘room’: camera (I) camra (P/U)
‘to wake up’: sveglia (I) [(morning: svere (P)]
‘to dream’: sogna (I) [( to sleep: soana (P/U)]
‘grandchild’: nipote (I) grandson: pota, plural pote (P)
‘youth’: giovani (I) javaani (P/U)
‘neck’: gola (I) galla (P)
The nature of the words can be classified as quite basic and primitive, with a mixture of nouns, verbs, noun and verb phrases and some adjectives, often with some variation in beginning or ending, leaving an echo of the same sounds in some cases. I didn’t find much similarity to Persian except ‘navey’ (grandchild) and ‘tu’ (you). The Italian ‘who is it?’ ‘chi e’ is the same as ‘ki e’ in terms of pronunciation in Persian (remembering that the Roman transcription of Persian is just approximate). Furthermore, accelerating the confusion for me, I realised that the same word ‘ki’ is ‘what’ in Panjabi (kya in Urdu) and this took a lot of time to assimilate.
Italian and Panjabi seem to echo more words of each other rather than Urdu, maybe because the latter is a more historically recent invention and more heavily influenced by a number of languages? I wonder…
Although this has been a very brief encounter for me in the vast beauty of concurrence in these languages, it has nevertheless been a fascinating one and something I will always treasure.
Thank you. Mamnun. Shukriya. Grazie.
Nabila Jameel 