"Where are they from?"
Translation:Di dove sono?
21 Comments
I've got li and la straight in my head (interchangeable)... but what about di and da?
Di = from (as in origin) Ex: I'm from Italy
Da = from (as in motion) Ex: I've just come from the market
It that case, it could be Da dove sono, right? That is a person asking where geographically a group may be from.
No. Where are are you from is like asking which country are you of, if you see what I mean.
With that question, you're asking "I am from where?". So in Italian this question is literally translated to, "From where, are they?" I can't answer completely as I do not speak Italian, only Spanish and English, but I hope it helped a bit.
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I am a bit baffled about the possible abiguity of the sentence "Di dove sono?". As such it could also indicate 'Where I (myself) am from?'. This is why I felt it necessary to add the Italian personal pronoun 'loro'.
In Italian, no sentence can end with a preposition. When a preposition governs a question word like where, who etc..., it is usually placed at the beginning of the sentence.
I wrote "Di dove loro sono?" But it told me I was wrong :( But I think I wrote right still.
This is just a gut reaction, but I have this strong sense that Italian expects to hear a verb after dove, thus phrases like dov'รจ, dove sono, dove siamo, etc. Since Di dove sono is ambiguous (is it sono io/loro?), to clarify the ambiguity, you add loro - but maintaining the dove [verb] with Di dove sono loro. That was my answer, and Duo accepted it.
