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- Topic: Italian >
- "Io ho fame."
74 Comments
Exactly. You would say "estoy hambriento" only when you want to sound funny. It's kind of like saying "I'm feeling esurient". Technically not wrong but no one would normally use it. For a second language speaker to pull of an unusual phrase is difficult, it just sounds like they don't know the normal phrase. Unless they are like so so so clearly very very good in the second language - until then better to stick to the normal language use.
I have a friend who is a native Dutch speaker, and he says that you can say ik ben hongerig
. It is grammatically correct and means something real, but it implies serious scarcity-level going hungry. When he was a child and tried to say "ik ben hongerig", his grandmother would remind him that she lived through the Great Depression and "wij waren hongerig" but "je hebt honger".
@kered9:
I am pretty sure it is the other way around. Europe relied on England so heavily that their languages all devolved from English
As someone who has studied linguistics and the history of languages, as well as having a passing familiarity with the history of Europe, I have to say sorry, but that's completely wrong. Until a few hundred years ago, English was a low-status Germanic language. It is a mutt of a language because it's absorbed the vocabulary of all of its invaders. If other languages have English borrowings, those are much more recent and far, far fewer.
There are Latin roots in English as the Romans occupied the Britannia. As there are are French roots, German, Danish, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_and_Latin_roots_in_English
1030
It occurred to me that this makes a lot more sense when your native language isn't English, or when you speak other languages - like German, where you can also say "I have hunger". Takes a bit getting used to when you learn Italian from English, and English isn't your native language...
320
I have tried to write ho fame, but duolingo insists on io ho fame. Why is that? Why can't I leave io out as in '(io) ho un libro'?