PieFedItalian speakers, can you understand Opera?
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FYI: apparently most Opera is in Italian, then French comes in distant second, German third.
FYI: apparently most Opera is in Italian, then French comes in distant second, German third.
Actually not always, it's a very distorted and "melodic" language
I figure it's a lot like listening to an American speak mangled Spanish. With the inflection and accents all wrong.
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The same thing happened with French in Canada
I was roughly told the same when I asked native Italians to translate an older choir song from Italy which I liked very much. To them it was mostly like some vaguely familiar sounding language with the occasional understandable word mixed in.
Yep, also the famous *Funiculì, funiculà* is in Neapolitan for instance.
Same for English, quite a few "American" accents are extinct British accents.
https://owlcation.com/humanities/brits-had-american-accents
It takes some time to get the ears accustomed to the weird vowel shapes but with a libretto it's easier!