"Ognuno dei suoi figli ha la propria stanza."
Translation:Each of his children has his own room.
17 Comments
Doesn't "figli" mean "children"? i.e. sons or daughters of unspecified gender? I think that in this case we use "their" in English. Infact "their" is increasingly used in speech after a singular verb when the gender is unknown or irrelevant
I agree with this, "their" should be accepted, especially as gender is unspecified and there are more than one of them.
205
'Their' isn't technically correct, but I agree that it is heard all the time in everyday English. It should be accepted.
the word figlio means son, figli is plural of figlio therefore figli means sons. However, DL rejects the word sons and imposes one to say children. Is DL dictatorial?
- 178
Why isnt sons accepted? I hate when duo forces you to know which option it is thinking. The more i use this app the more i realise its poorly put together.
- 1091
In English, "each has his own" is correct. Many English speakers say "their", and it's incorrect. Like Italian, I learned that unspecified gender defaults to masculine. (I'm a native English-speaker.)
inconsistency again. Ok,I mis-typed "everyone" instead of "Every one" but at other times this type of error is accepted with a "oh,oh, you have a typo"
did anyone try 'each of his children has his or her own room'? That's the correct form, the only one that would appear in print.
"La" is not "his", it's the feminine definite article followed by the feminine form of the adjective "propria" and the feminine noun "stanza".
A literal translation would be "Each of his children has the own room", but that makes no sense in English. Since "proprio/a", meaning "own", implies possession, the possessive pronoun is not needed in Italian, but it is needed in English.
There are some example sentences here: https://blogs.transparent.com/italian/proprio/
- 1014
Why not "its own room" when we don't know the gender and "each" makes it singular?
Italian doesn't have this problem because "propria" agrees with the noun and no possessive pronoun is necessary in the Italian sentence.
So it's a question of what's best in English, and in general, I think we avoid using "it" or "its" to refer to a person. The standard (which I realize is sexist) is to use "his" when we don't know the gender or when we're referring to a member of a mixed group.
But more and more, people are using "they" and "theirs" in these situations instead of just "his" or "his/her" or "his or her", which sound awkward because they are.
While "ognuno" is singular, it refers to each one of the children, so "their" might not sound out of place in this sentence.
Whether or not Duo accepts it is another story.
- 1761
I think this sentence has two parts which are "debated" in English. (1) each has or each have, and (2) his/her own room or their own room. At least according to the below source, it is debated even by usage panels: http://www.grammar.com/each-singular-or-plural/
I think all variants should in principle be accepted.
I think:
"Each of his children/sons have his/their own room." is wrong.
Substituting like so:
"Each one has his/their own room." shows that 'have' doesn't work.
It only sounds right in context of the plural 'children/sons' and seemingly plural 'their' (seemingly plural because 'their' is used here to mean a single person of unspecified gender).
