Italian gave us these English words but note the intonation

My previous posts have looked at the Italian words which are easy to recogize from the similar words in English.  If you like music you know or can easily see that we get the English words diva and maestro, piano and solo and sonata and soprano from Italian.

But you can also look at English words to find the Italian. If you want words in everyday language there are plenty more. I looked down the list in Wikipedia to select my favourites.

 Union Jack English flags in the UK. The English word coffee and the Italian word Gelato. 

English - Italian

balcony - il balcone

graffiti - writing - plural

Italian sounds smoothe and sonorous, a pleasing sound, even to speakers of Spanish, a language which is very similar. Italian, like Japanese, ends words with a vowel. The Japanese turn hotel into hoteru. The Italian for hotel is albergo. To remember the Italian I think of a lodging for the a followed by the l. But if you go to an Italian ski resort you just walk around and see the word Albergo everywhere on big buildings with balconies, so you quickly learn it.

The word graffiti is a reminder that the letter i is used to show the masculine plural. The names Maria and Mario are the singular masuline and singular plural.

I now have two common words acting as reminder for the masculine plural, spaghetti, and graffiti. 

English Intonation

English has German intonation, stamping loudly on the first syllable. Think of the word kindergarten, from kinder, child, and garten, garden. That is also a reminder of how the letters t and d occur in almost the same word in different languages. 

The English name Victoria sounds like VicTORia.

But Italian sounds the last vowel or the penultimate (last but one). We recognise this when we say Maria as MarIa. So the word Trattoria does not sound like Victoria but like Maria.