Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 November 2

= November 2 =

"balurda"– I can't find anything on it
I'm reading Smalltime by Russell Shorto. On one of the pages he says the poor in Italy when the northerners took over the country survived on something called balurda, a type of cornbread. However, when I google "balurda", I can't find anything on it. I can't find anything on it on the Italian Wikipeida either, the closest thing being La balorda by Ivan Della Mea. Any help is appreciated. Therapyisgood (talk) 07:19, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Similar to Polenta? --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 10:07, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The word pops up in Bergamasque dialect (in the last line quoted), but sadly no translation that I can see. It's unlikely to be actual cornbread, since maize for human consumption is a quite recent innovation in Europe. Alansplodge (talk) 12:49, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * In Italy by the end of the 18th Century maize production outstripped wheat in many part of Italy. The period of time OP referred to would be after the Risorgimento, when the north began systematically stripping the south of wealth to fund modernisation and industrialisation. I think Norman Lewis has something to say about this in The Honoured Society: The Mafia Conspiracy Observed. DuncanHill (talk) 14:44, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I stand corrected; see pane di granturco and pizzata Calabrese. Alansplodge (talk) 14:57, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Proserpina is the queen of the underworld, and the poem seems to be about terrible and infernal things and tremors and earthquakes, not about food items – I think teremòt is cognate to Italian terremoto. It looks to me as if the word balurda in the poem is an adjective modifying the noun cöcagna. Shorto's balurda may be a word that is local to Sicily. Sicilian is often considered distinct from standard Italian, for example on Wiktionary, with many words that have no recognizable Italian counterpart. --Lambiam 14:30, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I think it was Anthony Burgess who remarked that "there is no such language as Italian". DuncanHill (talk) 14:46, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The section Il pane ("Breads") in the article about the Sicilian cuisine on the Italian Wikipedia mentions that in the past bread became the main meal of poor families. This fits with Shorto's statement. The bread was made with semolina, which I imagine a US-based writer could confuse with medium-ground cornmeal. --Lambiam 14:49, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * There is a Spanish word balurdo (balurda in the feminine) meaning "mess", "of poor quality". DuncanHill (talk) 14:52, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * , this word was brought to South America by Italian immigrants, and does not exist in Iberian Spanish. --Soman (talk) 12:35, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The Italian word for "the" is L'è.  The Italian word for "earthquake" is terremoto.   The Italian words for "he loves" are lui ama.   I would guess that balurda is a verb in the present tense, third person singular. 2A00:23A8:4015:F501:ECF0:5FC:1553:EDF8 (talk) 16:24, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The Italian definite articles are (masculine singular) il or lo, (feminine singular) la, (masculine plural) gli and (feminine plural) le. L'è means "is" in Romagnol and Venetian, so I think it is reasonable to assume it is a verb form in Bergamasque too.  --Lambiam 04:45, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
 * There's also a French word balourd, which is possibly derived from the Italian balordo, and which means unrefined or clumsy. One can see that such a term could be applied to a sub-standard type of bread. Xuxl (talk) 16:59, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe it is related to the Italian feminine adjective balorda, meaning "silly", "foolish". Balurda could reasonably be a dialectal variation of balorda. --87.10.49.73 (talk) 21:09, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Google Translate says balurda means "stupid". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:10, 2 November 2023 (UTC)