Writing Italian

target: it — Italian, italiano, written left to right in the Latin alphabet. That is what makes it different from Persian or Japanese: its letters are the prose’s letters, so the studio cannot find it on its own.

1. Every run is marked#

Nothing in an Italian document is found by its script — every word or group you want set as Italian is marked, and any mark does:

• [bello]{tl}, or Italian’s code, [bello]{it};
• a colour, [bello]{teal}, or a pronunciation, [ancora]{translit:àncora};
• any other word in the braces (only la, ltr and math mean something else).

---target: it---In Italian [bello]{tl} = *beautiful*, [la casa]{it} = *the house*, and[ancora]{teal translit:àncora} = *anchor*; unmarked, bello is just a word.[Una frase intera, messa in rilievo.]{tl bg=sand}

A marked word is a run of the target language: counted, colourable and given a pronunciation from the reading view’s cloud, gathered into the glossary when it is glossed. A whole paragraph marked […]{tl} is a block, and takes a tint, bg=; inside a line the options are not read. There are no automatic paragraphs and no display lines: an unmarked Italian paragraph is prose.

A wrong form is a marked run after ✗: ✗[andato]{tl}.

2. Face#

Italian is set in the prose’s own face, TeX Gyre Pagella, at the prose’s size (1.00): what sets it apart is the mark, not the letters. It has no second face and is not set vertically.

3. Vocabulary entries#

Any ## heading with two parts or more is a vocabulary entry — the studio cannot tell an Italian headword from an English title — so a section title in an Italian document cannot hold a |.

---target: it---## pesca | pèsca | Latin *persica*, the Persian apple | = *peach*## [ancora]{teal translit:àncora} | | Greek *ánkyra* | = *anchor*

4. Pronunciation#

An Italian word’s translit: is a pronunciation aid, given only where the spelling does not say it, for the whole word or group:

• open and closed e and o: è for the open e, é for the closed; ò and ó the same (pésca peach, pèsca fishing);
• the stress, when it is not on the last syllable but one, or could be misread, marked as the dictionary marks it — a grave on à ì ù and on an open è ò, an acute on a closed é ó (àncora anchor, ancóra still; telèfono);
• s and z: s voiceless, ṡ voiced; z for /ts/, ż for /dz/ (càṡa, żèro, pizza);
• the sounds a reader from elsewhere misreads: gli as ʎ (fàmiʎa), gn as ɲ (ɲòkki), sc before e and i as ʃ (péʃe), and doubled consonants written double.

No pronunciation for a word that is read as it is written.

---target: it---[la pesca]{translit:la pèsca} *fishing* and [la pesca]{translit:la pésca} *the peach*;[gli gnocchi]{teal translit:ʎi ɲòkki}.

Italian has no reading: kana: means nothing here.