"Il riscaldamento va e viene."
Translation:The heating comes and goes.
72 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
It means the heating's not working in a stable way, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, randomly.
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It's extra confusing because in English we would be more likely to say that it comes and goes, as opposed to goes and comes.
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Quite right. The translation here could make learners think that va = comes & viene = goes when it's the other way around. Va is from the verb andare (to go) & viene from venire (to come). Irregular verbs are tricky enough without confusing beginner students!!
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I see you're learning spanish too. I'm native spanish, and I can tell you that you'll find this same phrase in Spanish too... it means "va y viene", I mean, it's works randomly: sometimes it works fine, sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it works poorly... it isn't stable :)
Wow we have a similar phrase in greek too which is used the same way . Πάει και έρχεται (pai ke erhete)
There is exactly the same phrase in turkish too.. i see it exists almost in every Mediterranean country on the way..spain,italy,greece,turkey...
This is what observe and understand. Similar to Spanish
Irse e Venire -Go (away) and come (back)- refers to the suspension and reactivation of certain services like electricity (often called "corrente" or "luce") and water. You might hear "la corrente si va ogni giorno alle otto e viene alle undici" Everyday the light goes (away) at 8:00 and comes (back) or returns at 11:00. This is, everyday the electric service is suspended at 8:00 and reactivated at 11:00. "La luce va e viene ogni giorno a la stessa ora, da cinco a sette dalla mattina".
Ire e venire (go and come) refers to the functioning of something. "Il ricalentamento va e viene" (the heating -referring to the heating system- goes and comes). That is, it stops working and then starts working again.
So somebody should call the most famous Italian plumbers that we all know very well ;-)
I think in French we say "va et vient" ; just like in Italian and in Spanish. But unlike English, which prefers "comes and goes". It sounds better !
Though harder to make certain jokes (that I probably shouldn't specify on a PG site)
"Va e viene" which is "comes and goes". Is there a grammatical reason for the word order?
No, just long tradition. It sounds weird to say "goes and comes". It's what's called a set phrase.
I don't know of any reason why English has the words in that order no. Euphony is the usual reason (it sounds better in that language)
I like that word Euphony! I agree, the meter sounds better, ba e ba-ba. "Comes" is one short syllable as is "va", "goes" seems longer similarto "viene". It almost has the rhythm of a wave, breaking on the beach and retreating back into the ocean
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Considering the lengthy discussion this has caused, perhaps this sentence should be moved to the idioms lesson. Can we all just agree that idioms are the way they are through tradition and traditions are regional and cultural. Romance languages do it one way, English the other. (I don't know if it extends to other Germanic languages. Any German speakers?) It's not unusual for English to be opposite of everyone else. Look at how the English insisted on driving on the left side of the road for no other reason than the French use the right. LOL Although, it also has something to do with one's sword arm.
No. Just being framed a little differently or having a different grammatical construction is not enough to make it an idiom.
The idioms section is about the kind of idiom that is completely opaque and cannot be understood at all on the surface.
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Judging by the number of posts saying it didn't make sense and it should be "on and off" suggests many highly intelligent people would differ. When this many people are confused, I usually stop blaming the people. The heating, whether it's "comes and goes" or "goes and comes", suggests on face value that your heater it getting up and leaving the house, only to return when it's finished its errands. I see your point that there are many idioms that are much more baffling. But, I guess it's a matter of degrees. How "opaque" does it have to be to qualify? Is "translucent" good enough? ;-)
The complaints come from a solidly English-language sense that the words "on" and "off" need to come in a certain sequence. I don't think I've seen anyone say they don't understand what it means, just that they don't understand why it's said slightly differently.
An idiom would be more along the lines of "Non vedo l'ora". Literally, it says "I cannot see the hour". Can you guess from this that it's used to mean "I can't wait"?
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Yes indeed. And when will (some) people realise that they shouldn't be trying to stamp the authority of their own language on the one they are learning.
Hi guys can you help about this words am always mistake with it. I have road( the heating goes and come ) I have got it wrong now I don't know which is which.
Literally word-for-word, the Italian says "The heating goes and comes." But in English, we say "The heating comes and goes". Translation is not about one-to-one word replacement. It needs to fit the target language.
Yes, but in this case we want to translate it according to how we actually say it. In English, we say it comes and goes.
I put 'the heating goes on and off'. Seems good to me. 'comes and goes' ?? who uses this in english.
Plenty of people say "comes and goes". Like me.
And "goes on and off" does not mean the same thing as "comes and goes". The former refers to it cycling on and off normally. The latter refers to when something goes wrong and sometimes it functions as it should and sometimes it doesn't.
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I wondered that too - as that's also what I wrote. In some languages 'It goes' and 'it is going' is the same tense. Maybe this is not the case in Italian. Can a moderator please clarify this?
In this case, it's a matter of that's not how the expression works. Just because you can use the simple present or the present progressive in general doesn't mean they mean the same thing and isn't always appropriate in all contexts.
The expression "the heat comes and goes" is always in the present simple. It means "sometimes the heating works right and sometimes it doesn't".
"The heat is coming and going" sounds off to me as a native speaker of Midwestern American English. It's not something that can be happening right now. It's the general overall state of how the heating functions.
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@Rostellan I'm not a moderator, but I might be able to help. Translation is as much an art as a skill. It would behoove you to give up on always finding a direct translation. Especially, with sayings and idioms.
"It goes" is plain, basic, vanilla, present tense. The funny thing is, we English speakers don't speak in present tense as often as one might think. We often use the gerund, as in, "It is going." It would sound strange to an English speaker to say, "Ok, I go now." We would use the gerund, "I am going."
However, speaking in present tense isn't strange in romance languages, such as Italian. If we were to write the sentence above as a gerund, it would read:
"Il riscaldamento sta andando e venendo."
But "comes and goes" or "goes and comes" sounds better to me, especially being a turn of phrase.
As explained elsewhere, "goes on and off" is how it's supposed to work.
"Comes and goes" means sometimes it functions the way it should and sometimes it doesn't.
In English we can use "heat" to represent the heating system, but it's not a good idea to assume it works the same way in Italian.
in English we normally would say comes and goes rather than goes and comes. Would that be marked wrong?
"Comes and goes" is the appropriate translation and should be marked right.
This is a case where the idiom differs between Italian and English, and so we need to reverse things to render it naturally in English. And in English, we say "The heating comes and goes". It means that it's not working the way it should; it's kind of broken. Sometimes it works okay and sometimes it doesn't. And this kind of thing sounds rather odd in the continuous aspect. It makes it sound like the on-again-off-again is all happening right now in this very moment rather than being a general description of how it works.
The sentence in italian is 'goes' and 'comes'. Yet i got it wrong because the correct answer was 'comes' and 'goes'. But this isn't what it says in Italian
Different languages are not blind one-to-one word swaps of each other. Different languages say things differently Translation is taking how something is said in the source language and rendering it naturally in the target language. Yes, in Italian they say "va e viene". And in English we say "comes and goes".
I understand that literally it is "comes and goes", but regarding the meaning, I think "goes on and off" would be correct as well.
'va' = goes and 'viene' = comes, so why is the sentence not constructed as 'Il riscaldamento viene e va'?
As of 2/1/22 DK allows "comes and goes" as well as "goes and comes". My brain doesnt hurt anymore!
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Thanks to you all, only for reading the forum I've understand that this means Russian "приходит и уходит":)