"Le nostre mogli fanno i vestiti."
Translation:Our wives make dresses.
27 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Duolingo: while women right around the world do make clothes -- they are factory workers, artisans, artists, homemakers who knit, sew, etc. -- there is, with this sentence and others in Duoling's Italian progamme, that seem biased towards women as homemakers, etc. and men as active -- out in the world. Please, I urge you, have a closer -- or wider -- look at your hidden biases and how these are -- no doubt -- feeding into your portrayls of people. I find myself getting increasingly irritated by the latter as I attempt to learn a language for which I have a lot of affection.
Ruchi...Good for you! You're not the first to point this out and it bears repeating. Good luck with your studies.
maybe i am not woke enough but to be fair we are here to learn a language and maybe for a woman it feels different but as a male if the sentence was "the men make dress and stay home" I really wouldn't be bothered but to each their own
Agree. As a male, i was also fascinated that in earlier lessons when asked to interpret a phrase e.g. il suo coltello, writing 'his knife' would simply be marked 'correct'. When writing 'her knife' it would be marked correct but say 'another translation is his knife'. This happened repeatedly.
Are there more important things in the world to get annoyed about.... Yes.
But actually does this reflect an unintended unconscious bias that is tediously outdated.... In my opinion yes it probably does.
1685
I agree -couldn't work out what this sentence meant as it seemed so old-fashioned. Please tell me Italy is not really this 'traditional'!
Is it not true? fanno i vestiti = make THE dresses (specific bunch of dresses) fanno vestiti = make dresses (in general, as a profession)
If it is not true, then how can italian accomplish these 2 meanings?
I think you're right, but as for clarifying the difference in italian, context will take care of that. Sentences like you find on DL are never spoken in isolation, out of context, so it's the specific situation that would express which of the two meanings is applicable.
moglie is feminine, no? "Le nostre... certainly indicates a feminine noun. So how come the plural is mogli?
Most nouns and adjectives ending in -e in the singular end in -i in the plural, and they can be any gender: il cane, i cani, l'arte, le arti.
I agree with Logan Atty. This is a language study. I believe that Duolingo didn't at all mean to diminish the role of women in our society. They simply teach you all kinds of combinations in all kinds of grammatical structures. They use humorous sentences for the same purpose at the risk of making us think they are stupid. But admit you have fun with sentences like " a snake in the boots" and the like. There are other more important things that should be paid attention to, like lack of explanation of turns of speech, exceptions in the rules, etc. What does irritate is that instead of having fun with this study, some people bring political issues on this board. This distracts from the main purpose and should not be happening!
Yeah "vestito" can be a more colloquial synonym of "abito" (suit), and both "i vestiti" and "gli abiti" can mean generically any clothes you wear.
Grazie. Generally, if gli abiti used more often than i vestiti for men's suits?
I think it varies regionally, but both terms are equally accepted; "abito" is perhaps a bit more correct, and present in some idioms like "abito talare" (priest cloth), and "abito da cerimonia" is more common than "vestito da cerimonia". But they're more or less synonyms, really.
my problem is with the translation of the verb, fanno. It seems to me that we could say our wives make the clothes but also our wives are making the clothes.
Why is 'mogli' wives and not husbands----are not words finishing in o or i masculine???
You can't really "do clothes". You do have to "make them" for it to make sense.
As a clarification, "doing the clothes" can mean to "do laundry", "wash/iron clothes" though I agree with you that it simply means to make them.
Here they have 'le' in front of 'nostre', but sometime there isn't article. Very confusing.
I said they have and duo marked it wrong! It was even in the drop down for the word fanna