13 Comments
When you type "Quanto è lungo" into google, you get many italian sentences with the words in that order. So this must be correct. Just a strange order to us English people.
Also NSFW, all I'm getting is sentences with pene.
This sentence literally translates to "What is the length of the bridge?" I think. For me this is the easy way to remember Romance language constructions like this. Note: TiSpaccoLaFaccia below is quite right. What was I thinking about when I wrote this comment?
Still confused - the words say "how much is long the bridge" which is not a construction I understand (yet!).
Obviously English or any other word order is not "universal" - but usually there is a sense to the structure of the sentence. Does anyone know why this sentance is constructed like this? Thx!
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I think that lungo, being an adjective, has to be next to il ponte, as it describes that noun. That's the only way I can make sense of this structure. Another example is: Quanto e grosso il tuo gatto? How big is your cat? In this case, grosso is next to "il tuo gatto" as it is describing "your cat" It also helps to remember that by itself, in this sentence, quanto already means "how long" (as it can mean how big, how much) so lungo does not need to be right next to quanto. Hope that helped some!
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Lara, I don't think that 'lungo' is an adjective here, but rather a noun, 'length'.
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Lungo can mean length and obviously does in this construction. As you point out, we can't always work these things out by our knowledge of English or any other language with which we may be familiar. So, taking the meaning as 'length' it translates as 'How much is the length...' I hope that helps some.
