Italian Vocabulary - part 1

When I started this a few months ago, I had very little knowledge of the Italian language. I had taken a semester of Italian back in college many decades ago, but I quit after one semester. Because I'd taken German in high school and junior high, as well as 2 summers of intensive study at a language 'camp', I was pretty conditioned to speaking in German. Unfortunately, once I started taking Italian, I quickly realized that even though I might start speaking a sentence in Italian, by the time I finished, I was going to be speaking German! For example, when I was asked 'come stai' (how are you) my answer always seemed to come out 'bene grazia, wie geht es dir'! (thanks, and how are you) I quit trying after one semester and most of what I learned has since faded away.

With my very, very limited knowledge of Italian, I really was pretty pessimistic about my ability to research Italian records. But I had a lot of help from the Italian Genealogy Facebook group and found some sources online, which I'll share here another time. I was pleasantly surprised by how easily I picked up a 'working knowledge' of the vocabulary I need to read genealogy records; things like numbers, occupations, relationships. I really have to say that I have more trouble deciphering the handwriting than I do understanding the words!

I don't know how often I will do this, but today I'm going to list a few of the words I learned this week.

• agricoltrice - farmer
• colono - tenant farmer, share cropper
• possidente - farmer who own his land
• pastore - pastor
  
• massaia - housewife
• gemelle/gemella - twin
• decudata - deceased

Hopefully, recording them here will help me retain these words. And MAYBE they will help someone else, too!