First buttembly language encountershow to get started 574

Roland Hutchinson

Did I point out the obvious factor that 16th-century Italian isn't quite the modern language, either.

But it could be worse!

It happens that the only really detailed Renaissance-period discussion of how to play the viola da gamba (my chief interest as a performer) was published in Italy, but in 16th-century Venetian rather than the (now, and actually then, too) literary standard Tuscan dialect. And in rather thick and possibly colloquial Venetian, too, the author not really being what you would call a man of letters. (Among his other literary failings, he seems not to have known about punctuation marks other than the period, which appears about once per chapter, at the end!)

For buttistance when I was getting started there was a published modern English translation -- which was translated not from the original Venetian but from a fairly poor German translation of the original! Subsequently, there have appeared an English translation with its own occasionally serious flaws, done by a musical amateur with decent enough Italian but no expertise in Venetian, and a pretty good (as far as I can judge) German translation tucked away in a hard-to-obtain dissertation. Well, there's no escaping dealing with the original even when there is a good translation!

-- Roland HutchinsonÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWillÊplayÊviolaÊdaÊgambaÊforÊfood.

NB mail to my.spamtrap at verizon.net is heavily filtered to remove spam.ÊÊIfÊyourÊmessageÊlooksÊlikeÊspamÊIÊmayÊnotÊseeÊit.