Life in the Middle Ages

[Angela]

This is a good documentary on the subject for lay people. It's by Alberto Angela, who is a paleontologist but very popular in Italy as a science and history popularizer. I like when these are done as quasi-films, as this is.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find an English sub-titled version. If I had the time I would do it myself. Some of our Italian members might consider contacting the production company and proposing that they be hired to do this for a number of his documentaries. I think it would greatly increase viewership, and they might also be sold to some venues outside Italy.

Still, I thought the Italian speakers who haven't seen it, and perhaps our Spanish members might find it interesting, so I decided to post it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AH3Fhq38r4

 

[Ygorcs]

Very nice. I'm 25min into the documentary and until now it's really very good and simple without being dumbed down, which I appreciate much, hehe.

By the way, as always, as a Portuguese speaker, I'm amazed at the clarity and emphasis of the pronunciation of Italian. It may sound like I'm exaggerating, but, maybe because I also have some basic notions of Italian due to 21 years listening to opera, I often find it easier to understand interviews and TV shows in Italian than in Spanish, due to the latter's quite muddled and weakened pronunciation of most consonants.

 

[Angela]

Very nice. I'm 25min into the documentary and until now it's really very good and simple without being dumbed down, which I appreciate much, hehe.

By the way, as always, as a Portuguese speaker, I'm amazed at the clarity and emphasis of the pronunciation of Italian. It may sound like I'm exaggerating, but, maybe because I also have some basic notions of Italian due to 21 years listening to opera, I often find it easier to understand interviews and TV shows in Italian than in Spanish, due to the latter's quite muddled and weakened pronunciation of most consonants.

What a good popularizer is supposed to do, yes?

As to Italian, I couldn't agree more. That clarity of pronunciation, pronouncing both double consonants if they are present, for example, is something that I really love about good, spoken, standard Italian. It's one of the reasons my father wouldn't allow me to speak dialect or even listen to it much. He wanted me to have that "crispness" and what he considered "purity" of speech.

It's a trait that I carried over to learning English, paying a great deal of attention to the pronunciation of what was, luckily for me, the sort of "standard American" that was spoken around me. I also paid a lot of attention to the speech of newscasters. The very deliberate use of lips, tongue, palate, etc. was ingrained from Italian. It also pays to have an ear, of course. As a result, when speaking publicly to a group of people they usually have absolutely no trouble understanding every word I say. The only downside is that people sometimes think I sound a bit British. Well, it's not a downside as I like standard "English", as in not regional speech.