February 2021

Toast and linguistics

Hello to all the transalpine people (we are all someone's transalpine, the French for the Italians, the Italians for the French).
I've never liked much, for gustative as well as semantic reasons, what they call in France "panini".
In the days when I travelled through the regions of Italy singing Pietre, La Tramontana, Cos'hai messo nell caffé, etc., we often stopped in motorway bars, and our meal often consisted of a paNINo
NOTE : please put the emphasis on the bold syllable, i.e. hardly pronounce the 'o'; let's say, leave the 'n' up, just 'think' the silent vowel, which should remain almost inaudible.

Or we would buy "paNIN'i" which meant "a paNINo and one or more others. »
So far, everything is clear even if (my Italian friends please forgive me!.) these "panini", systematically made with a kind of bread roll whose crust crumbled into large scales, were not, in my opinion, worth a "Paris butter sanswich in baguette" or even a hamburger!

Zoom a few decades later : the word "panini" became an international term for a kind of sandwich that I like even less, made from a doughy bread, and made worse by crushing it in a kind of curling iron, and which in France, even in the singular, is called PA-NI-NI.

"A PA-NI-NI" is an insult to grammar and pronunciation (not to mention gastronomy) ; a lost battle then. Also, already lost, no doubt, is the fight for a word and a concept that Francette and I discovered on a blessed spring day in the extraordinary village of La Corricella, on the island of Procida, in the Bay of Naples, in a small restaurant at the foot of the multicoloured houses, by the quayside where sailors were mending their nets.
I mean:"La Bruschetta". Alas in France they have started proonuncing, "Bruschetta" something like Brushette , when the only valid pronunciation is BrussKETT'a (and ideally in the plural of BRussKÈTT'é