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- "His steak does not have salt…
"His steak does not have salt."
Translation:La sua bistecca non ha sale.
45 Comments
What precisely was your answer?
AVERE/TO HAVE
io ho = I have
tu hai = you have
lui/lei ha = he/she/it has
noi abbiamo = we have
voi avete = you have
loro hanno = they have
https://www.italian-verbs.com/italian-verbs/conjugation.php?parola=avere
There are exceptions (unless you're dealing with something like Esperanto, there are always exceptions), but in general, the rule of thumb is this:
If the word ends in... | Then it's... |
---|---|
-o | masculine singular |
-i | masculine plural |
-a | feminine singular |
-e | feminine plural |
There are some words that end in -e
in the singular and -i
in the plural, and you just have to memorize whether they're masculine or feminine.
And then there are foreign loan words that end in whatever they end in (like "yogurt") and they're almost always masculine and don't change in the plural.
As for which definite article to use...
That leaves the question how to indicate the person we speak about. La sua bistecca ... can be his or her steak. How do I add the persons gender, if i want to clarify the case? In a conversation I would tend to: Giovanni's bistecca non ha il sale or Chiara's bistecca ha troppo sale. Just as example...
2107
In multiple choice I selected both of these options, however the second was marked wrong:
"La sua bistecca non ha sale."
"La propria bistecca non ha sale."
It seems like a valid (though perhaps slightly less accurate) translation to me, however I still struggle with Proprio.
Can anyone clarify?
Context, context, context.
And it does make sense. As you have observed, the possessives follow the same agreement rules as any other adjective. You're just used to how it works in English.
Italian speakers learning English want to know why it's "his" dog when clearly she's a nursing mother. Neither way is better than the other, they're just different strategies.
As explained elsewhere on this page, the possessive is just like any other adjective, so it must agree with the possessed thing and not the one who possesses it. The grammatical gender of a noun is relatively easy to determine, since most of them are regular. "La sua bistecca" can equally mean "his steak" or "her steak", but it must always be "la sua bistecca" because "bistecca" is feminine and it needs "la sua" for agreement.
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/634955?comment_id=28241432
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/634955?comment_id=34936001
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/634955?comment_id=41682858
172
What's the difference between "la sua" and "sua" ? It seems it's not the same here. When should I use one or another ?