Lamezia Terme and Galati Mamertino (Province of Messina): a comparison of two languages

By Francesco Polopoli

I can find no better opening than this as the perfect background for a contribution bent on joining up languages, peoples and cultures: I was born in the heart of Nebrodi, where the old Castrum appears to dominate the valleys, and the entire classical landscape of Val Dermone arranges its mountains like the wings of a stage. It was to these mountains and valleys that the poets turned even before Christ was born; and to these places even the poet Giosue Carducci turned when, saddened and tired of the miseries of history, he sought waters more pure than those of legend and, writing in Primavere elleniche (i.e. "Hellenic Springtimes"), he sang and called out for

: . . .The valley of Nebrodi
Of mountains lovely
Lonely, crowned with pine
Among whose springs
The shepherd sings
Divine songs to Daphne

The valley that you seek is here, in the great sylvan heart of Nebrodi, oh Poet of the Third Italy, here at the foot of the village where I was born and where I hope some day to die for the sake of a poem that itself will never die. Perhaps my town is not beautiful in itself, but it's beautiful in what it offers, and in the vision that it unlocks for us. Up here I was born. So, a snapshot of my town is a little like a snapshot of my soul, because even my soul has a smile and a frown; it has green clearings and bare rocks, carnations, watery springs, and dry and rugged stones-the pure grace of things that are simple, and also the foul fascination of the horrible; there is Peace there, and also "Force and Infinity," as Nino Ferrau's says in is book "Crepuscoli" (i.e. "Twilights"). Language as a commentary on the world? Ferrau's verses go on, revealing themselves in a predictive and oracular continuation:

. . .My thoughts, Like the hawks on the cliffs
Or coins in my pocket
Are eternal nomads
Yet only within myself do they find their aim,
Only within myself do they find a refuge. . .
In my native village

There is no doubt that whenever, through the strength of one's mind, one brings the world into one's thoughts, one organizes it and defines it according to linguistic categories. Nihil est in mundo, quod non est in textis . That is, nothing exists in reality that hasn't been formalized intellectually, or (in other words) that hasn't found some transposition into "the words and structure of thought." It's curious though that the bard of Galati Mamertino, Nino Ferrau, prestigious voice of the contemporary Italian literary landscape, with his lyric intuition links words with coins; it's a stylistically efficient relationship, poetic and suggestive, whether or not scientifically justified. Rossi Landi in Semiotica ed linguistica (i.e. "Semiotics and Linguistics"), Milan, 1979, affirms that a "linguistic community presents itself like a sort of immense market in which words, expressions, and meanings circulate like merchandise."

Like money, language also exists in the act of being spent; that is, each has a function only when released to others. Words, neither more nor less than money, acquire their value only within a system accepted by convention and agreement, whose specific characteristic is that of a social system organized around the presence of a sender and a receiver, as per Jacobsonian terminology. The wider the circulation, the more efficiently it is shared. The Italian "tongue," like any language, is a social institution that continuously talks and writes to us, enough to adapt to its own requirements and to conventional relationships, and thereby opens up communication along the common track of meaning and usage.

The dialects, on the other hand, despite the nation-wide diffusion of conventional Italian, constitute at the local level many geographic varieties of the Italian language, even if not as many alternative idioms to the Italian language itself. Even as late as the period of Italy's unification (1861), the dialects were the only linguistic reality understood and employed by the overwhelming majority of Italians. Italy's linguistic unity recalls and fulfills the fervent prediction of Pietro Ardito (1833-1889), notable Nicastrese literary figure, that he uttered at the foot of the remnants of Nicastro's castle, remnants that Frangipane called "a heap of ruins, standing like old skeletons of giants over a fragrant alley, at the shoulders of the borough of San Teodoro:" (Frangipane, quoted by Mirella Manfrici in the article Il Castello di Nicastro, i.e. "The Castle of Nicastro," in the publication Calabria sconosciuta, i.e. "Unknown Calabria," 1978 No.2, p.94): And may all unite in an alliance true, one law, one faith, one flag (from the verses of S. Peter and S. Mark)