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- Topic: Italian >
- "Il pranzo è il nostro."
24 Comments
I don't understand why you can say "Il gatto e mio." But here you have to say "il nostro" instead of just "nostro."
It's my understanding that if a sentence ends with the possessive pronoun, the definite article isn't required. Regardless of relationship. Also, I've seen instances where the definite article of the possessed noun count for the pronoun as well, making the second il redundant. Can I get confirmation from someone more knowledgeable than myself?
2056
"La gatta è la mia" means "The cat (vs. that other cat) is mine."
"La gatta è mia" means "The cat is mine (vs. his)."
- 276
That's helpful, thanks. Not sure I have the first clue how we are supposed to infer the context from the sentence, but I am now aware of the difference.
Why is "It is our lunch" incorrect? Although it is not the direct translation, in English it would sound odd to hear someone say "The lunch is ours". Normally, a native speaker would say "It is ours" or (specifically in this instance) "It is our lunch".
- 2056
We do say it that way in English:
"Hey, does any of this stuff belong to anyone?"
"The softball is mine."
I'm having difficulty understanding the articles before possesives. "Il pronzo è il nostro" is more or less in English, "The lunch is ours" ... but with a direct translation it's something like "the lunch is the ours" ... can someone explain the syntactical etymology of the additional article (is it Latinate?) or am I merely being stubborn, perhaps?
yes, it's latin specific: we say "il nostro" instead of the english version "ours" (2 words instead of one). it's just the language configuration (that's why it's so damn hard to learn!)
Thanks for your answer, but I still don't get it - duolingo has said that both forms are correct in various exercises. For example, in an earlier question it said "il caffè è tuo" is correct, but in others it has required the article as in "la marmellata è la tua".
I cannot see the difference, or why one would require the article while the other doesn't. Is the first response above incorrect? Is the article always required?
- 2056
Different grammatical structure.
Il pranzo è il nostro = The lunch is ours
noun phrase in the subject, possessive pronoun in the predicate
È il nostro pranzo = It is our lunch
(implied) pronoun in the subject, noun phrase in the predicate
- 2056
It should be.
Unless it was a multiple-choice question for you and it had both Il pranzo è il nostro and Il pranzo è nostro and you only selected one of them rather than both of them.
