"Are you going to cook the sausages with your fingers?"
He too was trying to be assertive and jesting, but he was the kind of person no one takes any notice of. The girovago rattled on in dialect, poking fun at us and at our being there in this inn. I did not quite follow.
"Signora!" said the girovago. "Do you understand Sardinian?"
"I understand Italian—and some Sardinian," she replied rather hotly. "And I know that you are trying to laugh at us—to make fun of us."
He laughed fatly and comfortably.
"Ah Signora," he said. "We have a language that you wouldn't understand—not one word. Nobody here would understand it but me and him—" he pointed to the black-browed one. "Everybody would want an interpreter—everybody."
But he did not say interpreter—he said intreprete, with the accent on the penultimate, as if it were some sort of priest.
"A what?" said I.
He repeated with tipsy unction, and I saw what he meant.
"Why?" said I. "Is it a dialect? What is your dialect?"