Never Trust a Teetotal: When the Glass (of Prosecco) is Always Full

In these times of pandemic and isolation, especially while being here Down Under so far away from our families, all of us expats are feeling much more homesick than usual. I have therefore felt the need to dedicate a post to a wine, Prosecco, which speaks so loud and clear of my hometown, Vittorio Veneto, and the area of the Prealpi Trevigiane where I come from. So please, teetotal readers out there, don’t take this blog entry as a personal attack at you, at all! The title refers to a rather a common joke that people in my region often use, and it is quite telling of how our culture is closely tied in with the world of grapevine and winemaking. Personally, I think it is absolutely fine if people choose not, or are otherwise unable, to consume alcohol – it leaves more wine to those of us who can drink it 😛 Jokes aside, please don’t get upset…like, for real, don’t.

For full disclaimer, and also to promote my locals a bit, I gathered the content of this post from several online sources from all over the world, but, in particular, I wish to mention the official webpage of Prosecco Conegliano e Valdobbiadene DOCG (https://www.prosecco.it/en/) and the Consortium for Prosecco DOC (https://www.prosecco.wine/).

Vittorio Veneto, my hometown, last time I was there in December 2019.

For those of you who are not too familiar with the world of wines, it might be helpful to know that a grape variety and the wine that comes from it don’t necessarily share the same name. This is especially true in Europe, where a wine is often named after the region where it is produced, rather than the grape it comes from, or it is named after the grape, but the region that shares the same name of the grape is not the area where the grape or wine is actually found. Why, you ask? Well, because we are Europeans and we like to complicate things – you are so very welcome 🙂

The terms used in the European wine industry are all regulated by specific appellations, or geographical denomination of origins, which are legally defined and binding policies. These regulations officially determine what a given area must grow, in what yield, what techniques are allowed, and what winemaking styles are expected to be found in the area. To use an oversimplified example, a wine coming from the Chardonnay grape in New Zealand will be labelled ‘Chardonnay’, but in France, you will not (or at least should not!) be able to go to a wine shop and find a bottle labelled ‘Chardonnay’. Rather, terms such as ‘Chablis’, ‘Puligny Montrachet’, ‘Beaune’, ‘Bourgogne’ can all refer to a Chardonnay-grape wine, even though the grape variety is not explicitly mentioned. That individual appellation will already tell the informed consumer where the wine was produced, and this in itself is enough to indicate which grape varieties were used, and which winemaking style they should be expecting. In its highly complex and peculiar nature, this appellation system ensures that there is no confusion at all around what you are about to drink – at least ideally…and if you know your wine geography well, that is.

Similarly, in Italy, the wine Montepulciano comes from the grape Montepulciano, and its appellation belongs to the region of Abruzzo, while the town of Montepulciano is actually located in Tuscany. There, wine enthusiasts can appreciate a red blend called ‘Vino Nobile di Montepulciano’ (Noble Wine of Montepulciano), whose main grape variety is actually Sangiovese (used also in the famous Chianti), with no trace of Montepulciano grape at all. Again, you are all very welcome 😛

At this point, it will not come as a surprise that the wine called Prosecco is made from a grape variety called Glera, and the appellation of Prosecco that my hometown belongs to (Conegliano e Valdobbiadene DOCG) is in the Veneto region, while the town of Prosecco is 150 km East, in the neighbouring region of Friuli Venezia Giulia. So, you will ask, what is the deal with this chaos of names where nothing is what it seems at first? And, most importantly, why are you stressing us out so much about wine this, and wine that? Because I can, obviously, and this is also my blog 🙂 Nah, just kidding – but let me tell you that there is a reason why people in my region often say “no sta fidarte degli astemi”, that is, never trust a teetotal.

I found this map on the website of a local winery, https://www.perlagewines.com/en/organic-wines/prosecco-superiore-docg-area/

The North-East of Italy can claim traces of notable winemaking since the Roman times. In particular, we can find praises to the quality of the wine in the region as far back as in Pliny the Elder (I century CE). For the area of the Prosecco DOCG, in particular, we can refer to the poet and bishop of Poitiers Venantius Fortunatus (VI century CE) who was actually born in the area. His home region, he says, is “the place where the grape vine flourishes on the foothills of the mountains, where the luscious vegetation covers the drier quarries”.

Quo Vineta Vernatur, Sub Monte Jugo Calvo, Quo Viror Umbrosus Tegit Sicca Metalla

Venantius Fortunatus

A current-time example of what Venantius was describing.

You might have noticed that no specific wine or grape varieties were mentioned, it was more a matter of identifying the area of the Prealpi with grapevines as a key landscape feature. Indeed, it seems that the ancestor of the wine that we know as Prosecco today was only explicitly recorded much later on. In particular, the first two known mentions of this wine occurred, coincidentally, twenty years apart from one another on the second half of the XVI century. One was a local source describing a celebration occurred in Conegliano, when the local wine was used in large amounts. The other one came from an English traveller, Fynes Moryson, who related the local Prosecho to the same wine commended by Pliny.

The first time the wine was called in its current form, Prosecco, seems to have occurred almost two hundred years later, when the priest and poet Aureliano Acanti celebrated the ‘melaromatico Prosecco‘ in 1754. To look more specifically at my hometown area, though, the intellectual and wine connoisseur Francesco Maria Malvolti first related the production of Prosecco with Conegliano in 1772. Coincidentally, Carpené Malvolti is still one of the most famous wineries in Conegliano to this very day.

Prosecco became the elegant sparkling white wine we know today towards the end of the 1800s/early 1900s, when new technologies allowed a refinement of the winemaking techniques. So it is not a coincidence that, in 1876, the first Oenological School in Italy was established right in Conegliano. The Istituto Superiore Cerletti has since been a state-of-the-art education provider in the areas of viticulture and winemaking at both secondary and tertiary level. This also happens to be the school where my brother studied, and, as you know, I am a super proud sister of a very smart and talented fella (who also took most of these cool photos I’m sharing), so yeah, just leaving this out there – with another photo, of course 🙂

The area of Vittorio Veneto/Conegliano/Valdobbiadene has therefore a deep historical and cultural connection with grapevines and winemaking, especially when it comes to Prosecco. This is so much so that, in 2019, the Hills of Prosecco of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene became a UNESCO World Heritage Site – not a minor form of acknowledgment, for sure. A local influencer, Canal – Il Canal, even made a video for the 2019 harvesting season, where he dubbed and performed a very famous song out in the vineyards to celebrate this great recognition, as well as the pride we take in our wine. Even the President of the Veneto Region Luca Zaia, who was born in Conegliano, has a small cameo in the video – you can spot him at the beginning in two different scenes https://youtu.be/RoMpSArpqsk.

In case you are wondering, yes, now I do have a giant smile on my face; yes, I may still be dancing and singing along; and yes, I am definitely daydreaming about being home drinking a glass of Prosecco. I mean, we even have vending machines for that…no wonder we don’t trust people who don’t like wine.

Salute!

The Language of Silence

Shibboleth was born as the outcome of an assignment for a Leadership programme I did in 2016 while I was completing my PhD. As such, it was a nice challenge, and a bit of a virtuosic exercise to discuss my greatest interest at the time: languages, in all their wonderful shapes and forms. It was never meant to be a regular activity: in a way, as the Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André would say, it was meant to live “a day only, just like the roses”. Having said that, I was most definitely not planning on having such a long break since my last post: I have not wrote anything since 21 June 2016 – yes, that is almost 5 years ago. The world is not the same anymore, even a pandemic happened. My circumstances, too, have evolved, and I am a different person now – dare I say better? I am still passionate about languages, of course, but life – being life – never turns out the way you want or plan…so yeah, a PhD later, I am not actually working as a sociolinguist like I wanted to, whatever that even meant.

Another thing that has somewhat resurfaced after this long hiatus is my interest for writing. Two things awoke the sleeping beast in the first place, and they coincidentally happened around a month ago within a few days from one another: a dear friend of mine updated me on the work she is doing to open her own blog, and another dear friend of mine presented two books he wrote. Learning about these two important events in my friends’ lives made be feel so absolutely proud of them and the determination they both put in what they love the most, everyday. On top of that, this brought me back to my past years, when I myself dedicated time to this thing I actually loved doing, writing. So the brain-storming began to find something to write about, something that would bring back that fire of words in me. What fully ignited the blaze happened earlier this week, when I received a very random email notification: someone happened to like a post from this blog. For a moment, when I opened the email, I looked at the content with a genuinely puzzled look: what is this?! And then the ‘ha-ah’ moment: I completely forgot about Shibboleth! How did that even happen?! I rushed back on this space, where I had a look at the few things I wrote about, and then I thought: this can be a nice way for me to ease into writing again! So yeah, here I am again, and this time I am writing about something I have been focusing on more and more, especially in the last year or so: the language of silence.

The silence I am primarily referring to, of course, is the one that filled my years away from non-work writing. However, that’s not the only meaning this expression has here. Explaining what the language of silence has become for me requires a bit of an introspective journey that touches on comfort zones, reflection, and a bit of meditation. It is my way to describe the process of learning how to be comfortable in your own skin, of enjoying your own company in order to really know yourself, just like the Delphic oracle recommended: after all, we must look inside, in order to thrive outside. Wanting to learn the language of silence, this way, represents a journey into our own mind, looking at expressing what we feel, and ultimately who we are, using a language that goes beyond words, and aims not so much at communicating with the others, but rather at prioritising communication with the self.

Not being a psychologist by study nor trade, I cannot really claim ownership on any geared or professional ‘how-to’ guide. However, I do believe that there are several ways to start approaching this journey in our daily routine, if we are willing to put any prejudice or presumption aside. A more targeted way of approaching the language of silence is through yoga, meditation and mindfulness. However, it can happen through something as simple as enjoying a cup of tea (or coffee) while looking outside of your window, or reading a book before going to sleep, or even just through a walk in the park. Ultimately, you can begin this learning experience through whatever it is that allows you to unwind and relax, and makes you feel comfortable without noisy (and nosey) distractions. The mind will do the rest, as it always does, and all you need to do is trust it and follow it, a bit like Alice running after the White Rabbit.

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there” Lewis Carroll

If you let your mind go as you dedicate your time to any of those activities, you will find yourself wandering and wondering about the day you had, the week you just went through, that work issue that really bothers you, or that person that you like, or dislike, or that family matter that you know you need to address, and yet you are hesitant. The thought process that follows will bring up feelings that may be positive, or not so positive, they may make you feel hurt, or angry, or disappointed, or sad…or yet excited, curious, happy, or relaxed. Allow yourself to know those feelings, identify them, perhaps even name them (…in your head, of course, this is the language of silence after all!).

Once you know what they are, try to really understand them, and what they represent in relation to you, and that particular person or event. A way to do so could be to ask yourself: what does that mean for me? Why am I bothered by this? Why do I feel so insecure about it? How is this thing affecting me? Where do I stand in relation to that person, or issue? On a more practical and immediate level, the answers to these questions will give you more information about what is going on inside you, and hopefully will direct you towards a solution that works for you. This will slowly but surely shed some guiding light on your very own meaningful journey. In the long run, though, this process will allow you to become more and more familiar with your inner self. You will get to know yourself a bit more by asking those very questions that you would ask others in normal conversation, but that perhaps you do not feel the opportunity, the need, or even the courage, to direct towards yourself.

This exercise requires a certain degree of trust and love for yourself, because it is, in fact, a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, or, if you prefer, of losing yourself to find yourself again. However, once you become proficient in the language of silence, you will be able to build a rapport with yourself that stands on the solid grounds of honest confidence around your own thoughts, and recognised value of your own company.

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The languages of “Vikings”

“Although he’s a foreigner, he speaks our language, don’t you? […] I want to learn some of your language. Will you teach me, priest?”

 

This is a quote from the third episode of the first season of the TV show Vikings (History Channel). The main character, the Viking warrior Ragnar Lothbrok, talks to Athelstan, the polyglot priest he took from England as a slave. What impressed me about Vikings, among the rest, is how historically and linguistically accurate it is (as much as a non-documentary show like Vikings can be). At the beginning of the first episode, we hear people speaking in a language that is not English, the main language of the show. We are thus immediately introduced into an ancient world (we are in the Early Middle Ages), where warrior farmers and fisherman spoke Old Norse. Old Norse is a North Germanic language that used to be spoken in Scandinavia, approximately in the areas now occupied by Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. As shown in the series, the language used the runic script.

 

 

In order to make sure that the pronunciation was accurate, the creator of the series Michael Hirst, with the help of a group of linguists, looked at the phonetic traits of Icelandic, which, among the modern languages, is the closest to Old Norse.

During the first season, Ragnar organises the first of a long series of discovery voyages heading West, thanks to which he reaches Britain. This is where we encounter the second and the third old languages of the show: Latin and Old English. Latin, the language of the Romans, at that stage was a literary language and the official language of the church in several parts of Europe, and it is indeed in a monastery that we hear it for the first time. The language, however, was hardly ever spoken in everyday conversation. In the Early Middle Ages, Latin had already started splitting into the various Romance Languages (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and so on), and people were using local varieties as means of communication. In Britain, for example, the common tongue was generally Old English. Spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, by whose name it is also known, Old English is another German language, and belongs to the Western branch of the family. The language was initially written with Runes, but later the Latin script was adopted: the famous epic poem Beowulf, for example, is written in a variety of Old English. What we now call English, however, is the by-product of a massive process of “Frenchisation” of language and culture that Britain experienced during the centuries. For these reasons, modern English is significantly different from Old English, which actually sounded more like modern German.

In the third and fourth seasons of Vikings, Ragnar and his warriors move to the mainland Europe and try to conquer Paris. This is where we find the last dead language of the show. In Paris, as in other Northern territories of France, people spoke Old French, which, in spite of its Romance origins, at that stage sounded more like modern German than modern French. Old French, or Gallo-Romance, was later known by the name langue d’oil, opposed to the langue d’oc, or Occitan, which was spoken in the southern parts of France.

Interestingly, the show uses these languages (with English subtitles) especially when speakers of different idioms come into contact. In this way, not only can we appreciate the variety of sounds of the languages, but also the real linguistic difficulties that these peoples encountered when exploring other territories. Conveniently for the show, however, Ragnar has two interpreters: Athelstan, the priest who can speak Old English, Old Norse and Latin, and the wanderer Sinric, who speaks Old Norse and Old French, and who accompanies Ragnar to Paris.

On the top of that, part of Vikings soundtrack is composed by Wardruna, a musical project based in Bergen, Norway. The songs are inspired by Northern spiritualism and are played with old Nordic instruments. When they are not instrumental, they are sung in three languages: Norwegian, Old Norse and its ancestor, Proto Norse. Given that today is Winter solstice in the Southern hemisphere, I will conclude this post with a quote from one of Wardruna’s song, NaudiR, named after one of the Runes:

Hjarter hamrar
Røkkidimma døljer
det auge kan sjå
Og vegen eg følgjer
og dei spora eg trår
er kalde, så kalde

>>>The heart is hammering

The smoke is hiding

What the eye can see

And the path I am taking

And the tracks I tread

Is cold, so cold<<<

Crno i belo (Црно и бело) – Black and white Eurovisions

The title of this post is a song by Kaliopi, the singer that represented Macedonia at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012. The topic I’m going to explore this time, as you may already suspect, is the language use in the famous European song competition.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has been organised since 1956, and it was initially developed on the model of Festival di Sanremo, the Italian music festival. All the countries of the continental Europe can participate with one song each, with generally one guest country from another continent. What is amazing about this competition is that it brings together countries, languages and cultures that, otherwise, would not be considered as part of similar traditions. ESC allows this and much more. People from Portugal to Azerbaijan, from Iceland to Malta listen to the same songs and vote for their favourite artists. In order to make sure that all countries have equal chances of winning, Europeans can vote for for three songs, with the exception of their own country’s artist (otherwise countries with larger population, such Russia, Germany or Turkey, would always win).

The first time I watched this show it was a summer evening of 2012. I was chatting with my mum about what was on TV for the evening, and we agreed on giving ESC a chance. It was revealing. On stage, that night, there was the Europe I know, with hundreds of identities and cultures, and with languages and geo-politics tightly entangled to one another. It was when I heard ‘Crno i belo’, though, that I understood the enormous potential of this competition. I had never heard Macedonian before, but in that moment I was doing my best to sing along. I wanted to know more, such as what the song was about, and why, at the time, there was a F.Y.R.O. before ‘Macedonia’ (which, by the way, means Former Yugoslav Republic Of). It was necessary only one song in a foreign language to trigger my curiosity. And that was also when I realised that ESC was not just a song contest, it was the embodiment of the remarkable diversity that we have, and that we too often forget about.

But does the Eurovision Song Contest really value our linguistic diversity?

Not so much, unfortunately. Especially if we look at the songs that made it to the finals in the period 2012-2016. Out of 26 finalist countries, in 2012 only 10 presented a song in a language other than English, 8 in 2013, 6 in 2014, and only 5 in 2015 and 2016. These numbers are definitely alarming. On one side, it is true that English is the official language of some of the participating countries, and it is also undeniable that English allows a larger audience to access the lyrics. On the other hand, though, native English speaking countries are definitely a minority in Europe, and the constant use of English as a lingua franca tends to suppress one of the biggest symbols of national identity: language. Even more, the artists are forced to sing in a language that is not their own, with sometimes disappointing results, particularly if we look at the reactions of the non-European English speaking audience.

The truth is that, when I hear a song from a country, I expect it to carry something authentic from that area. The sound, the melody, the instruments are surely important, but so is the language. When I see the name, the title and the nationality of the artist on screen, I hope to listen to something unexpected and unique, something that I will always be able to relate to that country. However, more often than not, I feel disappointed. The songs may be nice, for sure, but they lack of that national sparkle that they probably should have.

Not everything is lost, though. I am always pleased to see that there are countries that generally resist the urge to sing the whole song in English: among these there are Italy, Spain, France, and alternating Balkan and Eastern European countries such as Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Romania and Ukraine. Furthermore, if we look at the number of languages that have been used in ESC since its beginning, we find 61 idioms, basically one per year. The latest linguistic entry had its debut in this year’s winning song ‘1944’ by Jamala, who sang in English and Crimean Tatar. This is an encouraging result, but it is definitely not enough.

My dream would be to see every country presenting a song in their own language, not only to highlight their identity, but also to let other people know more about that idiom, how it sounds like, to what extent it is intelligible and so on. We should remember the song that Polina Gagarina (Russia) presented at the ESC last year:

We are the world’s people
Different yet we’re the same
We believe
We believe in a dream
[…]
When you hear our voices call
You won’t be lonely anymore
A million voices

 

“Speak, friend, and enter”

The quote is taken from the famous inscription on the Doors of Moria in “The Lord of the Rings”. The reason why I have chosen to use it as the title of my first post here is not my mere affection to Tolkien’s creations. It serves also the purpose of explaining the reason why this blog exists in the first place.

Maybe you cannot remember where you have heard the word Shibboleth before. It is actually a rather common encounter that all of us have every time we log into a website. Nevertheless, the word has a far more interesting linguistic meaning, which – I believe – easily justifies its employment in online logging-in systems. The term ‘shibboleth’, in effect, comes from the Bible book of Judges (12:6), where we read:

”All right, say ‘Shibboleth’”. If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him.

In sociolinguistics, shibboleth indicates a term that happens to be particularly hard to pronounce for people who are not used to a specific language. It is different from a tongue-twister, which in fact is a difficult phrase for anyone. A shibboleth, instead, causes problems to those who do not speak a particular idiom. A tongue-twister such as “How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?” is complicated even for English native speakers. On the other hand, a shibboleth  is normally pronounced without difficulties by all the speakers of a given linguistic community. The attention, with a shibboleth, is moved instead to the members of other groups, which may not be able to articulate certain sounds because these are not present in their native tongue. An example of shibboleth can be the Sicilian ciciri (chickpeas), used in the past to distinguish native speakers from French speakers, who represented the enemy. In Sicilian, the word sounds as if it was written “cheecheery” in English, with the stress on the first syllable, and the Italian alveolar/rolled ‘r’. The French, however, for the phonetic features of their language, tend to stress words on the last syllable and they pronounce ‘ci’ as ‘she’ and ‘r’ as a uvular/guttural r: that was enough to identify them as ‘outsiders’.

As we can see, shibboleths have a very important meaning in terms of identity and social and political belonging. We find the use of words as a way to determine identity in the literatures of all over the world, from the Native Americans to the Middle East. In this sense, a clarifying example is the term ‘barbarian’. The Greeks called βάρβαροι (bàrbaroi) those foreigners who spoke languages that, to them, sounded like a series of “ba ba ba”. So, language seems more than enough to determine social and cultural inclusion or exclusion, which eventually translates into a matter of survival. The Oath of the Horatii was “Rome or Death”…we could say the same for language. Of course, in current times, this death threat should not be taken too literally. What we witness now is a more subtle kind of demise, one that affects the culture and the identity of the person. And we should never make the mistake of thinking that language matters generate an isolated topic that involves countries and peoples on the far side of the world. All countries are multilingual, because they all have historical minorities, indigenous peoples, migrants and regional or local dialectal groups. Therefore, all countries should be responsible for managing these different speakers. The risk, otherwise, is to turn minority languages int0 a delicate battlefield for bigger socio-political conflicts.

What can we do, then?

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned the key to the riddle in the title. Tolkien fans will know that you should speak Mellon to enter. Mellon means ‘friend’ in Elvish, but it conveys a much bigger metaphor, and ultimately my idea of language. Language is a friend, it gives you access to worlds that you never thought possible. It is a treasure, a taonga in Māori. It should not generate conflict, but cultural enrichment and personal chances. Let’s make shibboleths an opportunity to recognise that we do not know enough about a language, and that we can improve by learning more about it. Let’s make multilingualism a beautiful opportunity for everybody to exchange knowledge, which, after all, is the highest intellectual achievement.