I’m now almost finished with the second volume of Ferrante (see this post; my wife has almost finished the third), and I’ve come across a passage that might have been written for Languagehat, so without further ado, here it is. The speaker has been studying in Pisa and has returned to Naples:
Language itself, in fact, had become a mark of alienation. I expressed myself in a way that was too complex for her, although I made an effort to speak in dialect, and when I realized that and simplified the sentences, the simplification made them unnatural and therefore confusing. Besides, the effort I had made to get rid of my Neapolitan accent hadn’t convinced the Pisans but was convincing to her, my father, my siblings, the whole neighborhood. On the street, in the stores, on the landing of our building, people treated me with a mixture of respect and mockery. Behind my back they began to call me the Pisan.
La lingua stessa, infatti, era diventata un segno di estraneità. Mi esprimevo in modo troppo complesso per lei, anche se mi sforzavo di parlare in dialetto, e quando me ne accorgevo e semplificavo le frasi, la semplificazione le rendeva innaturali e perciò confuse. Per di più lo sforzo che avevo fatto per cancellarmi dalla voce l’accento napoletano non aveva convinto i pisani ma stava convincendo lei, mio padre, i miei fratelli, tutto il rione. Per strada, nei negozi, sul pianerottolo di casa, la gente mi trattava con un misto di rispetto e sfottò. Cominciarono a chiamarmi alle spalle la pisana.
I have to say, by the way, that while Ann Goldstein, the translator, seems to do a good job, she has a tic that annoys me: she can’t seem to resist translating invece as “instead.” Obviously she knows as well as I do that it’s used more widely than the English word and that sometimes it’s better to use “but” or “on the other hand” or just not translate it, but habit gets the better of us all. It’s not a big deal, but I have a blog so I’m venting about it. Or, as Canine Cicero would have said: blogeo, ergo ventilo.
Incidentally, the noun sfottò (translated “mockery”) is obviously from sfottere ‘to mock, take the piss out of,’ itself a prefixed form of fottere, but I don’t understand the noun formation in -ò and will be grateful to anyone who can explain it.
I’m unsure this counts as an explanation, but sfottò is an irregular formation because it is colloquial and of regional origin. The regular Italian formations sfottimento and sfottitura also exist, though they are much less common.
Sfottere itself is of Roman origin, as the Treccani dictionary confirms. Sfottò may be originally Neapolitan, but I couldn’t find an authoritative source supporting or refuting this conjecture. It’s definitely of central-southern origin. Although it’s a full-fledged Italian word now, I wonder if it remains regionally differentiated.
At a completely subjective level, I’d never think of using the word like Ferrante. To me, sfottò is concrete and countable: a taunt is uno sfottò, but mockery isn’t lo sfottò. However, I cannot say if that’s just me or a more general Northern usage.
Thanks, that was extraordinarily helpful and interesting!
Something my friends and I noticed reading the first novel was the frequency of comma splices. Is that a feature of Italian, do you know?
I’m afraid I don’t.
sfottò is an irregular formation because it is colloquial and of regional origin
How common is the -ò ending and in which varieties of Italian?
Could invece be the Italian version of Hebrew davka?
I was preparing a squib on Archilochus, and a paper in Italian reminded me of this word sfottò.
There is a philological note on sfottò from Luca Serianni (2016) ‘Il contributo del Mezzogiorno alla lingua italiana contemporanea’ Italica vol. 93, no. 4 (on JSTOR here; Z = 2014 edition of Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana; DO = Devoto and Oli (2013–14) Vocabolario della lingua italiana; GRADIT = De Mauro et al. (1999) Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso; CDS = Corriere della Sera). See pages 780–1:
Relating to the strange formation, note the following discussion of oxytone words in Neapolitan, from Adam Ledgeway (2009) Grammatica diacronica del napoletano, p. 35–36:
Our word sfottò does not fall into any of these four categories. Perhaps a local form showing loss of -ne in the suffix -one? That is, a local equivalent to a *sfottone formed from sfottere, along the lines of abbaione ‘barking; mocking or taunting withs shouts’ from abbaiare ‘to bark; to shout, yell’ (this is just the first example of a semantically similar formation with -one that I found skimming the dictionary). Or a joking removal of the -ne from a *sfottone taken as paragogic, as described above? I was surprised to find no other philological analysis of this particular word besides Serianni (2016). Maybe others can find some more.
Very interesting finds — thanks!