This holiday in the States always reminds me of one of my favorite Zeneise words: scciûppâ ‘scoppiare, crepare; to burst, explode, kick the bucket’. It captures the true purpose of this holiday and it exhibits a phoneme that Genoese shares with Russian rather than other Romance languages: i.e., the sound written in Cyrillic as щ. This verb is pronounced /štšyp:a/ or in SAMPA /StSyp:a/. Hò mangiôu tanto che scciêuppo ‘I ate so much I'll burst’. There seems to be some variance between whether it is pronounced with a mid or high front rounded vowel: /ø/ ~ /y/. My family tended towards the former, but Casaccia lists his headword with the latter, even though the saying cited above uses the alternate pronunciation. Perhaps we should watch La Grande Bouffe tonight.
Posted by jim at November 27, 2003 12:06 PM | TrackBack