GESTICULATE TO BETTER ORGANIZE THOUGHT.

Gesticulating also has a significant impact on cognitive development according to a joint study by the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Chicago and the Italian CNR which analyzed Italian and American children showing that in both cultures those who gesticulate have greater ease in learning and in the overall linguistic development. Therefore gesticulating not only serves to express oneself better, but also to learn, to make more space in the memory and to acquire new notions and skills. This is also demonstrated by a research published in Science in which elementary school children who had to solve challenging math exercises were analyzed. Children invited to gesticulate freely solved their problems much more brilliantly than others who were asked to keep their hands still.

In conclusion, gesturing helps to communicate better, learn better and remember better. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “Thenatural,usualgesticulation,as it accompanies every lively conversation, is a real language and, in truth, a language much more universal than that of words, since, being independent of words, it is the same among all nations, although each nation makes use of it according to its degree of vivacity, and in some nations, for example among the Italians, it has received the addition of a few purely conventional gestures, which therefore have only a local significance ». Even the great Schopenhauer had seen in Italian gestures an extra gear, a personal and unique code that could only be understood by those who used it, but we know...

italians do it better.

With this intervention I will limit myself to the anamnesis for the state of health of Dante’s language in Italy (“the beautiful country where yes sounds”) and then talk about the various chronic or acute “pathologies”, episodes of illness, recrudescence, of convalescence and strengths and expressive abilities, in the field of fantasy and rhetoric, for which we are “milk brothers” with the Spaniards.

As a permanent literature teacher in high schools in Italy, for more than twenty years, as a writer, historian of philosophy, I have a not only literary approach towards my Italian mother tongue, but also philosophical and philological, matured at the School Normale SuperiorediPisa, accompanied by constant contact with speakers of the Italian language, of all ages and all levels of education, many of whom are not native speakers, both in Italian schools and in the courses I hold online for Italian courses, Latin and Greek with students from all over the world. Now not very accessible at “high” level, high school and university, the literary language from the eighteenth century back to the origins, the health of contemporary Italian, supervised by the Accademia della Crusca, cannot be excellent.

The most common mistakes in Italian, which becomes a Cinderella among European languages, without particular accents in young people, still characterized by inflections of regional pronunciations by adults who no longer speak the dialect of the family of origin - are certainly in the use of verbal, subjunctive and conditional modes, in the lexical poverty that becomes an inappropriate use of terms and logical connectives. One wonders if as from Latin, from “sermo vulgaris” the Romance and neo-Latin languages were born, also from this “sermo vulgaris” a new language will be born or only Italian will be lost, which