"We are in the hours of the night."
Translation:Siamo nelle ore della notte.
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I think nell' would really correspond to the cases where you use l'. (L'ora = nell'ora) You would use "le" even if it starts with a vowel (le ore, so nelle ore)
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I am still very confused, even though I looked at the website. It seems that the preposition "in" is followed by a definite article "the", so it seems that, as the website says, "they are combined to form one word". So, I don't understand why "nell'ore" is incorrect. Is it because "ore" is plural?
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How it works: You can't have "in la" or "in le" in Italian. They are respectively contracted to "nella" and "nelle". Finally, when the word starts with a vowel, ONLY "nella" can be contracted to "nell' ", as it is already the case with "la" alone and note with "le" alone. "nelle" has to remain the same, which is the case we have in this example.
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Argh!! Sometimes they want both sera and notte ticked other times not.
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What rule doesn't apply? I don't quite understand what you mean.
la notte / della notte
le notti / delle notti
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Because -i is a masculine ending (singular) but notte is feminine LA notte
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Well, I could be wrong, so someone should confirm this, but this is my understanding. Check out these two rules (found on the link that follows):
If a noun ends in "e" it can be either masculine or feminine and you must memorize the gender of the word. Examples: The word caffè is masculine but the word notte is feminine.If the word ends in "e" and you want to make it plural, you change the "e" to "i"
If the word ends in "e" and you want to make it plural, you change the "e" to "i" -ospedale means hospital but ospedali means hospitals. -
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The question wasn't answered. Why isn't nelle shortened to nell'? I thought one of thes preposition s could not let a vowel follow without foeming a contraction.
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ore is female plural ..
la ora / le ore
nella ora / nelle ore
http://italian.about.com/library/fare/blfare153a.htm
Whe are you supposed to use "a," as opposed to "nelle"? For instance, if I said "nello gennaio" for "in January" it would be wrong. So why is it now unacceptable to use "a" for time regarding hours?
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I don't understand how to use this sentence, do Italians often say so? Or is it just a one more useless duo-sentence?
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( ... besides how poetic it is ...) if it teaches us nothing else, it teaches us to be thoughtful of the endings of prepositions regarding words ending in 'e'. Notice how much confusion there is in this discussion over translating two simple things in the same sentence
>nelle ore
>della notte
I use the word 'simple' lightly; I've seen this sentence at least four times in four weeks, and today was the first time I didn't lose my heart to it! And you know what, I feel like I've accomplished something, because this time I actually translated it by figuring out each word and its ending knowing the rules. This was not possible for me a month ago, and I can only thank duolingo for it.
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Yes, you are right, but I just wanted to say that not every sentence you could use in the real life, even if the sentence is grammatically correct. I just wanted to know how it sounds for italians? Does it sound poetic or does it sound like some foreigner trying to say grammatically correct phrase? You can be perfect in grammar and produce very correct sentences but you will not sound like a fluent speaker if you don't feel the language and don't know how native speakers usually speak. I just wonder how often they use this sentence and how natural this sentence is.
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I completely agree with that Sunalooch. Hopefully a native Italian will come along and enlighten us :-)
