"Manca un coltello in cucina."
Translation:A knife is missing in the kitchen.
99 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
As far as I can tell, it goes like this. Mancare means "to be left" not "to leave".
Its like piaccere (to like). But actually, piaccere doesn't mean "to like" but instead "to be pleasing". So, in a direct translation, "A lei piaccono gli animale" literally means "The animals are pleasing to her" not "She likes the animals"
So, with mancare, "Manca un coltello in cucina" doesn't mean "(he, she, it) LEFT a knife in the kitchen", but instead "A knife is left in the kitchen" which would make more sense to say "A knife is missing in the kitchen".
Sure.
There really aren't perfect word-to-word translations, especially with these kinds of verbs. I was just trying to explain how one got from "(he/she/it) left" to "it is missing." The actual way of saying "A knife is being left in the kitchen" would be "Qualcuno sta lasciando un coltello in cucina," or 'Someone is leaving a knife in the kitchen," which is more correct in modern-day talk. If you were to go to someone and say "A knife is left in the kitchen," they'll have no clue what you're talking about.
Again, I was just trying to show how to get from "mancare" to "is missing." Neither of the sentences imply anything - they're just sentences with no context.
I can explain. Here, you can think of "manca" as being "left out," as if the knife were "left out of the kitchen," i.e. missing. Mancare means "to be lacking" or "to be missing." Note too that in Italian, "missing" works differently from English. Instead of saying "You miss me" (when we mean "you miss me'), we say "I am missing to you" ("(io) ti manco" or "io manco a te"). "You are missing a knife" is ""ti manca un coltello." (Note that in English, "you" is the sentence's subject, but not in Italian.) Hope this helps.
Amici Italiani: What does this MEAN? Did someone STEAL or LOSE one of our knives? In that case, we would say "A knife is missing FROM the kitchen". Or is the meaning that we don't have ANY knives at ALL and never did? In that case, we would say (although this would be a rather formal and stiff sentence): "The kitchen lacks a knife".
1116
I am italian. When we say manca un...... We want to say that in general there are 10 and today are only 9
I think it means what it says it means: "a knife is missing in the kitchen". Presumably there were a bunch of knives in the kitchen when one of them went missing. (From) where did it go missing? It went missing from/in the kitchen.
Here's a discussion about missing from/in where everyone seems to agree that both forms are acceptable: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2033626
Yea - it annoyed me as well - this made me translate it as "he leaves a knife ...".
Now with the explanations, and the correct translation it would seam that because it's a passive voice in English - it's like "A knife is missing ...", so it's not the direct translation, but the next best thing. The way I could understand it is
"Manca un coltello" in this case means that SOMEONE is missing a knife, an unspecified 3rd party. So the passive voice in English fits for this meaning, as it doesn't specify WHO is missing a knife. Any translation as "he/she misses" would be incorrect than.
But there's been tons of sentences with just that - 3rd person, where he/she could be picked at random, and were correct. I guess this could be some special case. On one hand - annoying as hell, but on the other - I guess we have to learn even those annoying special cases :)
380
It seems that mancare is similar to piacere so he misses a knife is: a lui manca un coltello, literally: a knife is missing to him.
There is a very good explanation on how to use Mancare & Piacere at: http://italian.about.com/od/verbs/a/italian-verb-piacere.htm
434
Agreed. "There isn't a knife in the kitchen" means, in English, that there are no knives in the kitchen at all.
"A knife is missing" says that one knife that should be in the kitchen is not there now.
434
Well, a kitchen knife is a type of knife. The kitchen is where it's intended to be used, but that isn't necessarily where it is.
While I'm not certain if this is true for Italian, in German we would also use this construction if we sat down for a meal and realized there weren't enough knives for everybody. So, even though that missing knife wasn't there to begin with, it 'is missed/missing/being missed'. (Uns fehlt ein Messer - a knife is missing/being missed by us)
mancare works like piacere, so the subject is the knife
http://italian.about.com/od/verbs/a/italian-verb-piacere.htm
1600
A knife is missing in the kitchen because it was used for murder in the bedroom. Makes perfect sense.
990
So even though we didn't learn this yet and I had to find it on another site, if we want to say that He is missing one of his knives, we'd use GLI in place of LUI. It certainly kills your progress and learning when you hover your mouse over Manca, and it says "He misses" Then you choose "he misses" (not because you make it up, but because DL itself tells you it's the answer!), and it's wrong.
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Yes, "è" is the main verb. You can't have "mancare" in the indicative here because it's secondary here. "Io manco" but "io è mancato."
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@Jacob191436
Here, the definite article is implied (in is normally used when speaking about rooms of your own house or relatives' rooms, friends' rooms, even though the articulated in is not grammatically incorrect).
For more on "in cucina vs nella cucina", read the discussion in the following link:
Both Emy__3 and CivisRomanus who've commented there, are very helpful Italian native speakers.