"Alcune donne sono più belle."
Translation:Some women are 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Finishing the sentence in that way would in fact make the meaning a lot clearer!
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."
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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"?
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
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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.
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Another voice I had difficulty understanding. I put 'bene' instead of 'belle' as that's what I thought I heard.