Thursday, May 3, 2012

Piedmontese, Days Two and Three

I'm being really strict with myself at keeping the one hour limit per day. Yesterday and today I went through a total of five more lessons from the Nòste Rèis course, but I could have spent a lot more time on it. It's turning out to be incredibly interesting to me. Each lesson has been taking me about 10 minutes to get through. Most of it is simple dialogs, but they've also introduced some simple reading, too.

Today, I spent another twenty minutes going through some grammar notes from the libero.it site. I've also found another grammar PDF file that I've downloaded titled "Grammatica Piemontese Fornita da Diego Casoni". It's laid out a bit more concisely, although it doesn't really cover anything that the Libero site doesn't already cover. One thing I did concentrate on from this document was numbers. It has a nice table that breaks down numbers by cardinal, ordinal, collective and multiplicative. Collective numbers, for example, are: for the number "two", couple and/or pair (cobia, pàira), for the number "six", half a dozen (mesa dosen-a, sesen-a), etc. Multiplicative examples would be: for the number "two", double (dobi) and for the number "three", triple (triplo), etc. Most interesting to me were the ordinal numbers. For the most part, they don't exist after "ninth", although that's not a hard-and-fast rule. Some Italianisms have crept in to fill the ordinal holes,  but the general construction for ordinal numbers is "that which makes number", so for example, if I wanted to say "Twenty-eighth" it would be col ch'a fà vinteut, or "that which makes twenty-eight. I don't know why, but I find that construction really interesting for a romance language.

Finally, I spent the final 20 minutes of today's allotment starting to learn some idiomatic expressions, again from the libero.it site. The site has a pretty healthy selection of phrases, so I started off with just ten for today.

And I'm still drilling myself with pronunciation. That's turning out to be a tough wall to knock down.

1 comment:

  1. Wow you're learning Piedmontese. Sorry for misreading this blog earlier. Nice language. It must be very similar to Italian.

    Good luck with the challenge!

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