Obituary of Ninalee Allen Craig: 'American in Italy' (III)

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(3) Obituary Ninalee Allen Craig | A Woman Walking; Ninalee Craig, née Allen, star of one of the 20th century's most controversial images, died on May 1st, aged 90.

Quote: she said "she was imagining she was Dante's Beatrice. She had studied the 'Divine Comedy' with Robert Fitzgerald at Sarah Lawrence in New York, and had fallen in love with that notion of unattainable beauty. Her dollar-a-night hotel was on the Arno, and she had a corny postcard of a Victorian painting by Henry Holiday tat showed Beatrice walking by the river, in shining white, ignoring the stricken Dante, who pressed his pounding heart at the sight of her.Who knew whether her very own Dante might not be standing on some corner, while she swept luminously by? * * * After that [the photo shoot in question] she climbed onto the backseat of Lambretta whose rider had drawn up to admire her, and went for a ride. * * * When a man whistled at you, or called out 'Que bella!,' you were appreciated. You walked taller. In that moment, you owned the street. She still kept the bag and shawl from that day, as well as the postcard in which Dante stood, staring, in Beatrice's path. How could Beatrice ever be vulnerable.  

Note:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b)
(i) Craig (given name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_(given_name)
(ii) The Jewish (eastern Ashkenazic) surname Orkin means child of "the Yiddish male personal name Orke, a pet form of Aaron + the eastern Slavic possessive suffix -in."
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.
(c) Divine Comedy  神曲
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy
("The Roman poet Virgil guides him [Dante] through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman whom he had met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition, which is highlighted in Dante's earlier work La Vita Nuova")
(d) Robert Fitzgerald
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fitzgerald
(1910 – 1985; American; "an instructor at Sarah Lawrence")
(e) "Que bella!" is Spanish, not Italian. "Que bella!" is anglicized from "¡Qué bella!" in Spanish. In Spanish, "¡Qué bella!" is the same as "¡Qué bonita!" and "¡Qué linda!."  Compare Linda (given name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(given_name)
(of German origin; "Subsequent support for its appeal may have come from the neo-Latin language (Italian, Spanish or Portuguese) word linda, which is the feminine form of [adjective] lindo, meaning 'beautiful, pretty, cute' (Spanish and Portuguese) and 'clean' (Italian)" )
(i) Spanish-English dictionary:
* bello (adjective masculine; feminine bella): "beautiful"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bello

is not a noun.
* ruido (noun masculine): "noise"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ruido
(ii)
(A) Emanuel del Mar, A Concise and Simplified Grammar of the Spanish Language. 3rd ed. Cadiz , Hortal and Co, 1840, at page 12
https://books.google.com/books?i ... grammar&f=false
("23. The Indefinite Article [a/an in English] is omitted in Spanish * * *
26. Also after the word what [spanish qué], used before a noun in exclamation or surprise: Ex,
What a noise!  ¡Que ruido!
What a fine view!  ¡Que bella vista!")

* The two examples given were erroneous to the extent that "Que" in each should have been "Qué." See (e)(ii)(B) to (F).
* The noun ruido is defined above -- in (e)(i). Its pronunciation is in (e)(iii); hint: "ruido" has two (ie, rwi-do), not three (ie, not ru-i-do), syllables.
* In Spanish, "¡Qué ruido!" means "What a noise!"  HOWEVER, "¿Que ruido?" means "What noise?."
(B) Demuth K et al, The Development of Articles in Children’s Early Spanish: Prosodic Interactions Between Lexical and Grammatical Form. First Language (journal), 32: 17-37 (1992), at Web page 14
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org ... b63ff02217a2ba6.pdf
("An article is not required with * * * que [sic] (e.g., ¡Qué probléma! 'What a problem') * * * ")

Similarly, "¿Que probléma?" means "What problem?."
(C) The symbol in é above the letter e is acute accent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent
(section 1 Uses, section 1.2 Pitch, section 1.2.1 Greek: explanation for "acute" //  section 1.8 Disambiguation: "• Spanish. Covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs where the first is stressed and the second is a clitic, such as cómo (interrogative 'how') and como (non-interrogative 'how,' comparative 'like,' 'I eat'), differentiates qué (what) from que (that), dónde and donde 'where,' and some other words such as tú 'you' and tu 'your,' té 'tea' and te 'you' (direct/indirect object), él 'he/him' and el ('the,' masculine), sólo 'only' (as in 'solamente') and solo 'alone' ")

The Spanish cognate for accent is noun masculine "acento."
(D) qué ([same as Spanish que] from Latin quid ; homophone que):
"adjective[:] what; which (interrogative only)   ¿Qué camisa quiere? ― Which shirt do you want?

adverb[:]
        1 : (before a noun) what a; such   ¡Qué lástima! ― What a pity!
        2: (before an adjective) how (used as a modifier to indicate surprise, delight, or other strong feelings)
                ¡Qué feo! ― How ugly!
                ¡Qué alto! ― He's/it's so tall!
                ¡Qué guay! ― That's so cool!

pronoun[:] what (interrogative only)   ¿Qué ves? ― What do you see?"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/qué

Spanish-English dictionary:
* ves (verb): "Informal second-person singular (tú [you]) present indicative form of ver [English translation: see; from Latin verb root videō I see]"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ves
(E) Spanish orthography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography
("Spanish uses only the acute accent, over any vowel: á é í ó ú. This accent is used to mark the tonic (stressed) syllable, though it may also be used occasionally in monosyllabic words to distinguish homophones such as si ('if') and sí ('yes').  * * * When acute accent and diaeresis [¨ as in ü] marks are used on vowels (⟨á⟩, ⟨é⟩, ⟨í⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨ú⟩ and ⟨ü⟩) they are considered variants of the plain vowel letters, but ⟨ñ⟩ is considered a separate letter from ⟨n⟩")
(F)
* Spanish pronouns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_pronouns
(section 3 Relative pronouns, section 3.6 Notes on relative and interrogative pronouns)
* English has both relative and interrogative pronouns, too. See  pronoun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun
(section 1 Type, section 1.5 Indefinite: examples in English + section 1.7 Interrogative: "In English and many other languages (eg French and Czech), the sets of relative and interrogative pronouns are nearly identical. Compare English: Who is that? (interrogative) and I know the woman who came (relative). In some other languages, interrogative pronouns and indefinite pronouns are frequently identical; for example, Standard Chinese 什么 shénme means 'what?' as well as 'something' or 'anything' [my own example: 什么都不做]" )
(iii) pronunciation of Spanish noun masculine "ruido":
(A) QUESTION: What is a diphthong in Spanish? How will it help my students to know this? In Spanish Phonetics, Center for the Liberal Arts, University of Virginia, last modified May 10, 2018
www.virginia.edu/cla/avd/linguis ... /spanish-phonetics/
("A diphthong can be one of three possible combinations of vowels:

1. a weak then a strong vowel (for example, siete)
2. a strong then a weak vowel (for example, seis)
3. two weak vowels (for example, fuimos and ciudad)

The Spanish word siete has only two syllables (sie-te), and the stressed vowel (la vocal tónica) is the e as it is the strong one in the diphthong.

The word seis has only one syllable because it contains a diphthong, of which the e is the stressed vowel.

When two weak vowels are together, it is typically the second vowel that is stressed, like the verb fuimos [first-person plural (nosotros, nosotras [we]) preterite indicative form of ir (to go) or ser (to be) ] where the i is stressed in the first of the two syllables. However, depending on the number of syllables in the word, both of the weak vowels may be unstressed ('átonas') as in the Spanish words ciudad and cuidado. These words consist of two syllables; with ciudad ending in the consonant d, the last syllable is stressed, thus leaving both weak vowels unstressed, and the o on the end of cuidado [past participle of verb cuidar to take care of, to pay attention to] shifts the stress to the second syllable, -da­-, again leaving the syllable with two weak vowels unstressed.")
(B) * diphthong ui
https://studyspanish.com/pronunc ... epeat/diphthongs_ui
(" 'ui' (or 'uy' word ending [as in muy, meaning very in English]), is pronounced like the English word 'we' ")

pronunciation for other Spanish diphthongs in the same website:
*  'ie,' is pronounced somewhat like the English word 'yea'
* " 'iu,' is similar to the English word 'you' "
* " 'ei' (or 'ey' word ending), is pronounced like the 'ay' in the English word 'say' "

(f)
(i) The female given name Beatrice (spelled the same way in both English and Italian but pronounced differently with respect to the last syllable: in Italian c before e is pronounced like tʃ in English. See Italian orthography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_orthography
(section 3 C and G)
(ii) Beatrice (in English and Italian) and Beatriz (Spanish) are from Latin female given name Beatrix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrix
(iii) Beatrice Portinari (1265-1290 -- 24 or 25 years old) was born and died (cause unknown -- not recorded anywhere, not even by Dante) in Florence.  She was the muse of Dante Alighieri.