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- "Alcune donne sono più belle."
69 Comments
Yes it definitely sounds like mele, although it obviously wouldn't make sense :)
some women are more apples.
hey, it could've been some kind of weird italian expression. AHAHA!
For those who missed it: alcuni/e - "a few" (i.e. "some"); pochi/e = "few".
Do you really need the 'a' or is ' few women are prettier' OK, too. The meaning is very similar.
The small difference between "a few" and "few" is significant here. Few (of these) are green emphasizes a very small amount but A few (of these) are green is more along the lines of some.
I agree that "few" and "a few" do give quite different emphases. Does the Italian sentence definitely mean "a few/some" though?
Yes. In positive contexts, alcuni means some. In negated contexts, it means any.
So, "alcune donne non sono piu belle" would mean "any woman would be more beautiful?
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'A few' could be 5 out of a hundred. 'Some' could be twenty, but 5 would still be possible. The words are vaguely defined.
Basically this is just an educated guess and needs confirmation by a native speaker, but I think this doesn't work because the partitive construction degli/delle should only work as a variant of unstressed alguni/algune. In this sentence it would seem rather unnatural to me not to stress algune, or in English some. In some positions in a sentence the Italian partitive is even more like an obligatory plural indefinite article like French des.
Couldn't this mean 'Some women are really beautiful?'
Saying some women are more beautiful without providing a point of reference is awkward. A slightly nonsensical stub--unfortunately typical of Duolingo though. If these were in a context, offered with snippets of conversation, it'd make a difference.
If you think of algune as translating to any, it seems logical to understand it as not any in this case. But that's wrong. Algune only translates as any in Italian sentences that are actually negated. When there is no negation, algune translates as some.
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So if it said, 'Alcune donne NON sono più belle,' would that allow the translation 'No women are more beautiful'? Because I tried 'no' and was also marked wrong.
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It would mean 'some women aren't more beautiful'. A straight negation of the main sentence.
I had the same question because the drop-down hints or suggestions for alcune had the word "no" among the possibilities.
Mas isn't even an Italian word. It's Spanish for più.
Regarding the initial sound in belle: I guess you are just not used to hearing unaspirated b, i.e. without any breathing out. As you are trying to make sense of what you hear, you interpret it as the closest unaspirated consonant you know, which may well be m, though personally I would have thought v more likely.
This sentence has been insulting women for years on Duolingo. In fact I think at this point it's the center piece in "Duo's Drive-by Misogyny" hall of fame. No amount of reporting changes any of these random women-focused insults on Duo. When it eventually becomes an issue that can't be ignored, watch the company say it had no idea. I really do keep waiting for some weird random sentence about blacks or Asians. But I guess that would be too obvious.
Shouldn't this be in its own section entitled: Demeaning Women? Dl could throw in 'She has too many boyfriends'. Imagine if these types of sentences were being taught in a brick and mortar class!
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Tip: Check the drop down hints and use the first. The possibilities of its being the preferred word are much greater.
Be aware that checking reduces the amount you strengthen the word by, though.
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Yes, I am but you also have to weigh your options. If I'm not sure it might also indicate that the word needs to be revised. I completed my German tree months ago and the revisions never end, some I breeze through and others I still stumble over, so the revisions are necessary. But I do thank you and appreciate your advice.
I'm wondering we have to use articles so often in this section. What am I missing? Getting nervous...
Finishing the sentence in that way would in fact make the meaning a lot clearer!
how do I know whether alcune means "some" or "no" both definitions could be used in this context.
"More" is a comparative that cries out for the other half (than ...), so that, like many of the practices DL has us do, this is not a complete sentence. Leaving the period out would make more sense and be more helpful.
I guess your day job is rewriting the classical English literature into proper English that follows your ideology?
This is just a single sentence. The "than" concept of which you "speak" (by which I mean "write" (by which I mean type)) could be in the surrounding sentences. "She was quiet a beautiful woman. Some women are more beautiful. They as a rule are just as likely to have the personality of a rock as not."
Thanks to this discussion I understand that this phrase is an objective statement regarding 'some women' or perhaps a comparison regarding a woman. (More beautiful than - - - - -?). What I would like to know, if a native speaker is reading, is how one would say the flattering phrase: "Few women are more beautiful"?
i wrote 'some women are more beutiful. i was told that my answer was wrong and it is actually 'some women are more pretty'...
I typed "Few women are more beautiful", and was marked wrong, with the correct answer indicated as "A few women are more beautiful". Why is "Few women..." wrong?
There is an important distinction in the Germanic languages including English, which more and more native speakers of English no longer fully understand:
- few women = not many women
- a few women = some women, though probably not many (except in: quite a few women)
- little food = not much food
- a little food = some food, though probably not much
Technically speaking, "few women" gives a vague small upper bound for the number of women, and "a few women" gives a vague small lower bound.
English teachers, when doing drills on this, sometimes claim that "few" assumes a negative point of view and "a few" assumes a positive point of view. But that is only true when talking about the number of something positive. When talking about the number of something negative it's actually the other way round. You can find quite a few tutorials on the distinction on YouTube, though only few get the explanation right.
Those English speakers who no longer understand the distinction sometimes claim that in "[a] few" the indefinite article is always wrong -- or that it is required. Both claims, as well as the general phenomenon, are probably reactions to the fact that in colloquial speech even speakers who still fully understand the distinction often pronounce "a few" and "a little" in such a way that the article a is inaudible. (A natural language change phenomenon caused by the fact that a is unstressed and doesn't contribute much to meaning.) But they generally think that they are pronouncing it where appropriate, and when writing a sentence down will write it. As a result, some younger English speakers never hear "a few" or "a little", and when they see it in print they think it's a mistake or an affectation. Others realise that what is pronounced "few" or "little" without an article is often spelled "a few" or "a little", and think that when this is not the case it's a mistake or informal.
There are currently several rules of English that are under revision in a similar way, simply due to the fact that many younger speakers no longer understand the original rule and make up their own instead. A more prominent one is the rule governing the use of whom vs. who. But it takes a long time for a new rule of grammar to be considered correct, and in the meantime only the traditional rule is accepted. Which, in our case, means:
- alcune donne = a few women
- poche donne = few women
Interestingly put. I'm aware of the difference in nuance between "few" and "a few" - I just thought that alcune meant "few" as well as "a few". For a native English speaker, the confusion is perhaps heightened by the false friendship between alcune (Italian) and aucune (French).
Ah, in that case sorry for overexplaining. (I agree that the alcune/aucune thing is confusing.) In any case, maybe my long explanation can prevent us from getting the kind of protracted discussion here that I have been involved with on a similar sentence in the Dutch course.
Lovely clear explanation. Thank you. Just to confirm your last statement - If I wanted to flatter a woman in Italian I could say "poche donne sono piu belle"? Whereas this sentence as it stands is not flattering?
Yes, exactly. Your sentence is flattering unless it happens to be factually correct (in which case you would need to claim that no other woman is more beautiful to make it flattering). The original statement, however, when seen as a statement of fact, would apply to all beautiful women. Technically it can also regarded as applying to ugly women (just like it's not necessarily wrong, technically speaking, to say that 'a few people' have a head, though of course with plain 'few people' it would be wrong). And therefore it can't be flattering.
