Saturday, July 2, 2011

Molto Belle

By Matt Machia

DISSONANCE, A MINGLING OF discordant sound/Lack of agreement. Every person that has ever been to a culture outside their own can attest to these situations. I have been in Europe for the past two months and I can pull out ten situations I have encountered with “a mingling” that has ended up with an excessive “lack of agreement”.

I was walking home from my second day out in Florence and came across my first Florence native. I asked, “can you show me Nazionale?” They would look at me strangely and walk away. This had happened several times. Perhaps it was because it was late at night, and they were alone. It is possible they thought I was asking them to come to Nazionale with me. Luckily I found my way back by myself after 3 hours of searching.

My next encounter didn’t happen until Cagli. I asked the bartender, “com’e sta” she responded “si”. My next response was “molto bene?” She looked hesitant and said grazie and turned away. Dan at that point looked over at me and asked, “did you just say molto belle?” By the language barrier there was definitely a situation of dissonance, by her response it is most likely she heard me call her beautiful. This had left it in an uncomfortable situation. Later that night I encountered another situation where I scheduled an appointment for my interview for tonight. We exchanged names and I was guaranteed the interview. Tonight the interview did not happen. There could have been the language barrier of when the interview was actually taking place. The language barrier is a strong possibility to the reason the interview never occurred.

I feel culture does play a large part in the communication dissonance. However, I feel that the language barrier plays the largest role in communication dissonance. In my situations my issues have always been from the language barrier.

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