Strains Of Greek Blood Can Be Traced With Certainty By Their Track Of
Folklore And Poetry And Song, Such As Still Echoes Among The Vales Of
Sparta And Along The Bosphorus.
Greek words are rather rare here, and
those that one hears - such as sciusciello, caruso, crisommele,
etc.
- Have long ago been garnered by scholars like De Grandis, Moltedo,
and Salvatore Mele. So Naples is far more Hellenic in dialect, lore,
song and gesture than these regions, which are still rich in pure
latinisms of speech, such as surgere (to arise); scitare (excitare - to
arouse); e (est - yes); fetare (foetare); trasete (transitus - passage of
quails); titillare (to tickle); craje (cras - to-morrow); pastena (a
plantation of young vines; Ulpian has "pastinum instituere"). A woman is
called "muliera," a girl "figliola," and children speak of their fathers
as "tata" (see Martial, epig. I, 101). Only yesterday I added a
beautiful latinism to my collection, when an old woman, in whose cottage
I sometimes repose, remarked to me, "Non avete virtu oggi " - you are not
up to the mark to-day. The real, antique virtue! I ought to have
embraced her. No wonder I have no "virtue" just now. This savage
Vulturnian wind - did it not sap the Roman virtue at Cannae?
All those relics of older civilizations are disappearing under the
standardizing influence of conscription, emigration and national schooling.
And soon enough the Contranome-system will become a thing of the
past. I shall be sorry to see it go, though it has often driven me
nearly crazy.
What is a contranome?
The same as a sopranome. It is a nickname which, as with the Russian
peasants, takes the place of Christian and surname together. A man will
tell you: "My name is Luigi, but they call me, by contranome,
O'Canzirro. I don't know my surname." Some of these nicknames are
intelligible, such as O'Sborramurella, which refers to the man's
profession of building those walls without mortar which are always
tumbling down and being repaired again; or O'Sciacquariello (acqua - a
leaking - one whose money leaks from his pocket - a spendthrift); or San
Pietro, from his saintly appearance; O'Civile, who is so uncivilized, or
Cristoforo Colombo, because he is so very wideawake. But eighty per cent
of them are quite obscure even to their owners, going back, as they do,
to some forgotten trick or incident during childhood or to some pet name
which even in the beginning meant nothing. Nearly every man and boy has
his contranome by which, and by which alone, he is known in his
village; the women seldomer, unless they are conspicuous by some
peculiarity, such as A'Sbirra (the spy), or A'Paponnessa (the fat
one) - whose counterpart, in the male sex, would be O'Tripone.
Conceive, now, what trouble it entails to find a man in a strange
village if you happen not to know his contranome (and how on earth are
you to discover it?), if his surname means nothing to the inhabitants,
and his Christian name is shared by a hundred others.
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