Grisotto

-------- By J. L. Speranza
-------------- for the Grice Club

------------- PERHAPS ITALIAN has more of a Gricean bearing to Latin, since, as I am wont of saying, it's the same place. "The Italians never really felt the need to conquer, unlike the Romans". M. Chase reprimanded me, "What you say offends the Northern Africans". Ah well. No offence meant!

But what I mean is, the Romans did not need an accent. When did this otiosity grow with the Tuscans? For I assume it was _THEM_.

Apparently, the dot on the i, the wiki says, is an Italian invention, too. You see, those monks were pretty clumsy, so we have things like

INGENII

which bothered them, so they started to stress the latter i and i, and the rest is ... legend.

This below from the wiki, as I elaborate

--- the E versus e, ie. 'is' versus 'and' IS otiose, but as Kramer notes, cheap enough. I mean, it cannot have a function other than a diacritic. It cannot mean that we stress "is" more than we stress "and": this monk could have decided to stress the 'and' instead.

--- The Italians seem cleverer than the Spaniards on this one: "Lattone". No need to write, "LAttone" or "LaTTONE" (cfr. Grice on CONtent versus conTENT, this blog -- longish excerpts in "Reading between the lines", this blog). The first means, "Latvian", the second, 'big bed'. But surely the context should suffice, even if the utterer is clumsy enough (as this Latvian wife who kept telling everyone who cared to listen that she was a big bed) to keep mispronouncing things. Ah well.

The French is even trickier. Etc. Circumflex, for example, is what R. Hancock calls 'etymological' circumflex: hospital --> hopital, etc. coup de Grice with circumflex i, etc.

From the wiki, diacritic.

"Italian mainly has the acute and

the grave

(à, è/é, ì, ò/ó, ù),

typically to indicate a stressed

syllable that would not be

stressed under the normal rules of

pronunciation"

-- how do people KNOW those things? They don't. Cfr. Grice's only example, "CONtent" versus "conTENT". And LEttone versus LeTTONE.

"but sometimes also to distinguish

between words that are otherwise

spelled the same way

(e.g. "e", and; "è", is)."