Languagle #4: Italian
Chi dorme non piglia pesci
"Whoever sleeps catches no fish."
What it means
Used to say that sitting back and waiting gets you nothing, that whoever acts first, or stays alert, is the one who benefits.
How to say it
kee DOR-meh non PEEL-yah PEH-shee
The gl in piglia sounds like the lli in 'million', and sci in pesci sounds like 'shee'. Roll the r.
Word by word
- Chi kee: whoever
- dorme DOR-meh: sleeps
- non non: not
- piglia PEEL-yah: catches (an everyday word for takes)
- pesci PEH-shee: fish (plural)
Ch in Italian is always a hard k sound, never the ch in 'church'.
Where it comes from
It traces to the Roman playwright Plautus's comedy Rudens, written around the 3rd century BC, which has a line to the effect that those who like to stay in bed rest without profit and to their own cost. The saying kept its literal fishing sense for centuries after: a fisherman who slept in missed the hours the fish were actually biting.
Where it was found
Italian calls a proverb a proverbio. This one is from Italian Wikiquote.
Similar sayings
- Spanish: Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente. The shrimp that falls asleep gets carried off by the current.
- English: The early bird catches the worm
How to recognise Italian
Italian words nearly always end in a vowel, and double consonants like tt, ll and zz are everywhere. Look for ch and gh before e or i, and for gli, gn and sci. The only accents you usually see are on a final vowel: città, perché. Spanish has ñ and ¿, Portuguese has ã, ç, nh and lh, and Romanian has ă, ș and ț. Sardinian and Venetian can look like Italian at a glance, but Sardinian plurals end in -s and Venetian often drops the final vowel.
About the Italian language
Italian is a Romance language with around 65 million native speakers, official in Italy, San Marino, Vatican City and parts of Switzerland. Modern standard Italian grew out of the Tuscan dialect of Florence, the language of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Of the major Romance languages it is often described as the closest to Latin in its vocabulary. Many regional languages, such as Sardinian and Venetian, are still spoken alongside it.
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