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Italian
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Acquerello Italiano is an audio magazine for intermediate to advanced Italian learners. It is a subscription program that includes the magazine, an hour-long CD or cassette, plus an optional study supplement. It is designed to improve your vocabulary, grammar and listening comprehension, as well as your cultural understanding of the Italian-speaking world. Each magazine includes about a dozen articles on topics ranging from politics and economics to tourism and geography to music and cuisine.
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In general, all letters or digraphs represent phonemes rather clearly, and in standard varieties of Italian, there is little allophonic variation. The most notable exceptions are assimilation of /n/ in point of articulation before consonants, assimilatory voicing of /s/ to following voiced consonants, and vowel length (vowels are long in stressed open syllables, and short elsewhere) — compare with the enormous number of allophones of the English phoneme /t/. Spelling is clearly phonemic and difficult to mistake given a clear pronunciation. Exceptions are generally only found in foreign borrowings. There are fewer cases of dyslexia than among speakers of languages such as English
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Many medieval Italian castles have their origins from feuding families, and quarrelsome aristocrats. Sometimes, entire cities would be walled to provide protection for its inhabitants. Wealthy families would construct residential towers for their relatives. Some excellent examples of Italian castles and fortifications constructed by Italy's merchant princes have been preserved in cities like Florence, Bologna, and Volterra.
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"RALEIGH, N.C., July 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Italian author Robert Bernocco has amazed the literary world by publishing the world's first book written using a mobile phone. Bernocco published it on Lulu.com, the online
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Mass migration to the United States began as early as 1872, but substantial Italian immigration to the United States is noted between 1884 and 1920 when approximately 7 million Italians arrived. Most Italian immigrants departed from Southern Italy and landed in New York City. Italian arrivals increased by chain migration, which is a process whereby immigrants arriving in America acted as personal labor agents and told their family and friends when and where jobs were available. This flow continued as long as favorable economic conditions existed in America. The growth of the U.S. gave the immigrants opportunities beyond the city limits. Italians proceeded to move north to Peekskill and Poughkeepsie.
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The history of the Italian language is long, but the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. The earliest surviving texts which can definitely be called Italian (as opposed to its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae from the region of Benevento dating from 960-963.[4] Italian was first formalized in the first years of the 14th century through the works of Dante Alighieri, who mixed southern Italian languages, especially Sicilian, with his native Tuscan in his epic poems known collectively as the Commedia, to which Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina. Dante's much-loved works were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that others could all understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language and... the dialect of Tuscany became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy
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