Language
Italian Canadians offer good lessons in preserving Old World culture in the land of milk and honey. If someone asked me what I’ve been asking people for the past week, I know what I would say. Am I Dutch first or Canadian? Well, Canadian of course, but I am proud of my Dutch name. And no, I don’t speak any…
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In the unusual spelling of my family name lies a significant aspect of North American Italian culture. Schembri is the original spelling of my name, as it appears in the birth record of my grandfather in the nineteenth-century municipal record book in Bivona, Sicily.The vulgarization of surnames is, of course, typical among North American immigrants. It happened often for obvious…
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Early childhood is the best time to learn a second language, according to Dr. Laura Ann Petitto, a neuropsychologist and the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory for Language and Child Development at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study, conducted at McGill University in Montreal, concludes that children under seven who are systematically and equally exposed to two…
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