University of Rome III-Degree in Languages & International Communication-Convener: Patrick Boylan-Academic year 06-07


TASK 2 MODULE II


NAME Valentina Ersilia FAMILY NAME Matrascìa GROUP H DATE 13/05/07


a. Your Italian Maxims & Counter-Maxims plus your double's maxims
b. What you saw and heard that was "strange"
c. The pressures you felt to conform
d. The values that (b.) and (c.) represent.
e. The different way that you expressed yourself in Italian (you used perfect Italian but you should have spoken the way your double would have expressed himself or herself). In your report, give a few examples of real sentences that you said and the reactions that these sentences provoked.



  1. Everything have to be perfect and in order or at least seems to be like this / Everything, even if only in apparence,have to appeare perfect at the word’ eyes


  1. You have to be always clear and direct in your speech and in what you do


  1. Play always loyally


  1. Accept failure with dignity


  1. Pay respect to your mates and also to you enemy


  1. Everyone have to respect rules


  1. Blame who don’t respect rules and try to cheat


  1. If you want achieve your objective, you have to fight for it


  1. A man may climb Everest for himself, but at the summit he plants his country's flag (NATIONALISM)


  1. Interests of the group came always before the individual one


  1. I fight on, I fight to win / when you fight - fight to win / You may have to fight a battle more than once, to win it. ( PERSEVERANCE)


  1. Pennies don't fall from heaven, they have to be earned here on earth ( SAVING MONEY)


  1. No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well ( SAVING MONEY)


  1. Constitutions have to be written on hearts, not just paper (LEGALITY)


  1. If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing. (NO COMPROMISE)


  1. Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.






Io come italiana: “Every time in your life you need something, you have only to ask it to your family and they would do it for you”

Io come Margaret Thatcher: “You have to be independent and try to solve your problems with only all your strengths!”


Io come italiana: “Respect and give ear to what grey headed say, they are much more wise and experienced than you”

Io come Margaret Thatcher: “Follow always your ideas and your opinions. Nobody can know more than you!”


Io come italiana: “You are not waited to respect and adapt to the rules but the rules are waited to adapt to you and your needs”

Io come Margaret Thatcher: “Everyone have to respect rules in every situation and also to blame who don’t respect rules and try to cheat”



INTRODUCTORY NOTE


Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, a county in the east of England.

She speaks SBE (SOUTH EAST BRITISH ENGLISH or STANDARD BRITISH ENGLISH),spoken by the upper classes but with an Received Pronunciation (RP) because of hers petty bourgeois origin.

For this reason, in order to achieve an high position into the professional and socio- political scene [as she said during the Speech to the Conservative Party Conference (14 October, 1977), ”People from my sort of background needed Grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams and Anthony Wedgwood Benn”], she had to study in a grammar school and sometimes she exagerates this pronunciation and fall into a form of “ipercorrettismo”, a pshycologic and linguistic phenomenon very common in the middle class, for which she cares so much about (grammatical and stylistic) rules and about avoiding mistakes and mi-spell to risk the opposite mistake, to speak, write and be too much “perfect” and so appear excessive and exagerate. ( “Everything, even if only in apparence,have to appeare perfect”,it’s an important anglo value see it also in my double values) .

In writing, expecially in Accademic and Official paper, she follows strictly and rigorously the rules of the British Academic English Style: her writing is LINEAR, EXPLICIT,RESPONSIBLE,FORMAL, HEDGED, GENTLEMANLY.


REPORT

This report is to explain what I have learnt about Italian family and in particular about Valentina’s family, which is the one I have the possibility to know, living with them for some weeks.


Firstly, what I discovered is that Italian family is a sort of shell in which every member can feel very protect and in shelter from all the external menaces; this protection is given most of all from mothers, that are the real family’s pilaster. Suddenly, this kind of armour and preservation doesn’t stop hen child are grow up and some times it can became a golden cage in which they can not feel really independent and autonomous but very fragile and can influenced all theirs future relationship with other people and with the word in general. I am going to give you an example of this, describing one of my days in the Valentina’s family.


This morning I woke up at the 7, 45 a.m. in order to clean my room and prepare breakfast for all the family. When Valentina’s mother saw me in the kitchen at that hour, she looked at me very astonished because Valentina had never done things like that, and every Sunday she didn’t wake up before 9 ‘o clock.

She asked me: “Are you feeling well?” “ What’s happen to you?”” Have the Martians done a exchange between my daughter and her clone this night?”

I answered : “Yes, I am feeling very well, thank you! I have simply prepared breakfast..”


After the shock to see me awake at that hour and preparing breakfast for the whole family, she and the rest of the family were very pleased of that. Personally, it seems to me very strange and I don’t understand why it seems us so astonishing what I have done, because I think that everyone have to be independent and do something to help the group of people s/he lives with, like in a big team in which every component works hard to achieve a personal satisfaction and at the same time to enable the team to get its goals.


During all the morning, I tried to understand how they are really organised into their family. In order to do this, I observed how they behave and how they interact between them. They spent all the day doing different activities but they left that only one person (the mother) had the responsibility to clean, preparing meals and supervising on all the family activities. She feels, in my opinion, this kind of assignment she has, is not something she chose but only something that she has to do without any other particular reason if not that is “all mother’s duty”; in fact; when I ask her to explain me why she behaves in this way, after have watched at me as if was asking her something so obviously to seems almost absurd, she answers me that

“A mother is a person who have most of the others the duty of protect all the people she loves”.

This kind of duty remember me the Queen’s one, but I can feel, at the same time, that when that it can be also a terrible burden for the mother but also this kind of “Big Brother” that oversee, watch and know everything about all the aspects of the family members’ life, can make feel them too much observed and guarded.


Awhile before the lunchtime, the father is watching at the TV newscast in the living room and commenting all the news loudly so, also the mother can hear him from the kitchen and replies him things like “yes, obviously..” or “mmm.. of course” , but without really listen at him and at same way, he doesn’t really matter her opinion but he tells her the news simply “to pretend” to share them with her. When I sat on the sofa near him, and ask him really what he thinks about the news, he was amazed and tried to understand why I was acting in this way. Only after have asked me, what I need (“What’s happened to you?”, ”Do you need something, my dear?…money?”) and after my reassurance that everything was ok and I was feeling very well and I wanted only discuss with him the news, I told me his opinion. I express mine, that was completely opposite than his, and initially he smiled me as told me “Yes.. yes ..you think so .. only because you are young and you know what the real life as well as I know it”. I tried again to ask him for some explanation about his ideas and explain him why I saw thinks as I did, but he gets a bit nervous and he told me explicitly what before he told me only with his smile and facial expression. I was very insistent because I think, as I told him, that “everyone can have a personal opinion, even thought s/he has not had so much experiences due fro the age.. if you have not 50 years, it doesn’t mean that you have not a running brain and his /her opinion can be as correct than yours!!” . I get very angry because it sounds me very incredible that someone can think that being an adult or simply older than someone else means to have the “holy unique thruth” in your pocket, but I discovered that it normal in Italy to think that experiences and years means necessary wise and knowledge and that child have to considered much more than their personal opinion, their parents’ one. Now, from this point of view, I can understand from this point of view, the reason of the father ‘s reaction.


In conclusion, what I learn out about Italian family is that it is a sort of équipe in which suddenly there are many words but there is not very much real communication. All the component follow a non written series of rules but they don’t feel them really but they respect them only because of a convention, because “it had always been in this way and it has to be necessary in this way”. Anyway, I notice also a straight conjunction between all the people that are in it, and it can be considered – I think – a positive aspect.

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f Tornando nella tua persona italiana abituale, dopo aver scritto la parte in inglese della Relazione Finale, descrivi in italiano l'esperienza complessivamente, ciò che essa ti ha insegnato -- insomma il suo valore educativo o meno, ai fini dell'apprendimento della lingua inglese. Puoi anche rivelare se i tuoi hanno chiamato la Neuro.




Questa esperienza mi ha permesso di vedere la mia famiglia con occhi completamente diversi da quelli con cui la vedo ogni giorno. Più di una volta durante il mio esperimento, ho sentito da parte dei miei familiari la spinta a “rientrare nei ranghi”, di smetterla di avere questo comportamento “sopra le righe”, attraverso inviti verbali più o meno diretti ( “Ma ti senti bene ?’,”Ma cosa ti sta succedendo?”, “smettila di fare la pazza.. e comportati come una persona matura”, “Ti stai comportando come una ragazzina immatura e sconsiderata”) e non verbali ( lo sguardo perpelesso dei miei genitori di fronte alle mie “stranezze” o semplicemente il fatto che dopo la discussione con mio padre, lui ha finto di ignorarmi per circa tre ore prima di cercare una riappacificazione, tentando di farmi sentire in colpa per il mio atteggiamento “alquanto bizzarro e irrispettoso”, come da lui stesso definito dopo.

A seguito di questa discussione e delle tensioni familiari e personali che si erano create, il mio esperimento è terminato più o meno alle 16, ma- nonostante ciò- ho potuto verificare ugualmente alcuni particolari cambiamenti sia nel mio modo di esprimermi – molto più anglosassone, sebbene parlassi in italiano, di quanto io abbia mai notato anche nelle occasioni in cui ho avuto modo di parlare in inglese- e nel mio modo di agire sicuramente molto più diretto e esplicito di quanto non lo sia normalmente nella mia identità culturale italiana.

Oltre a darmi l’occasione di osservare dall’esterno la mia quotidianità, questo esercizio mi ha permesso di imparare l’inglese perché mi ha fatto sentire inglese, cioè in alcuni particolari momenti mi sono accorta di provare dei sentimenti che non appartengono al mio “abituale essere culturale italiano” ma mi hanno permesso di provare qualcosa di molto simile a ciò che avrebbe provato il mio doppio secondo la descrizione e le massime culturali che la caratterizzano da me stilate. Proprio in virtù di ciò, ritengo questa esperienza fortemente educativa in quanto ci permette di capire praticamente quanto una lingua vada oltre alla semplice sintassi e lessico ma sia un “modo di essere” e di esprimere il proprio essere culturale.