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- Topic: Italian >
- "La tigre beve acqua."
64 Comments
1215
Well, as an italian native speaker I would like to explain that in italian the words "tigre" and "scimmia" are always feminine words. If you want to specify the gender, you have to say "la tigre maschio" or "la tigre femmina", and yes, Rae.F is right when he/she says that native speakers play with their language. In fact, "Il tigre" is only a wordplay, used in an advertisement too. Just to know it, sometimes the male monkey is referred as "lo scimmione", but it's mainly sarchastic.
There's even an Italian film named "Il tigre": http://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_tigre
That's weird.
314
In Portuguese and Spanish, it is possible that someone gets a moniker from a different grammatical gender. In this case, the moniker "adopts" in the person's gender. This seems to be the case here: tigre is feminine but the person who got the nickname is a man, so now the noun is treated in this specific example as masculine.
It can be a bit confusing but it is not unusual in more informal situations.
The rules in Italian are more complicated than they are in Portuguese.
Portuguese definite articles:
o
= masculine singular
os
= masculine plural
a
= feminine singular
as
= feminine plural
Italian definite articles:
il
= masculine singular
lo
= masculine singular if the next word begins with s+consonant, other consonant clusters, z, or y
l'
= masculine singular if the next word begins with a vowel
i
= masculine plural for the singular il
gli
= masculine plural for the singular lo
or l'
la
= feminine singular
l'
= feminine singular if the next word begins with a vowel
le
= feminine plural
https://ciaoitaliablog.wordpress.com/classes/italian-definite-article/
Italian is a lot more predictable than French when it comes to the grammatical gender of its nouns. I'm not saying it's perfectly regular (it has exceptions, as all natural languages do), but it has a mostly reliable pattern, unlike the "e" thing in French, which is a myth -- You're thinking of how the otherwise identical feminine form of a word will be spelled with an extra e.
Generally, words that end in
-o
= masculine, singular
-i
= masculine, plural
-a
= feminine, singular
-e
= feminine, plural
690
Our teacher always said that one vowel should not follow another vowel. Therefore to say la tigre beve L'acqua should be correct as the definite article should be placed after beve.
167
Two screens ago, the narrator said la tigre so that's what I wrote, and it was wrong. The correct answer was Le tigre. So when it came around again I typed Le tigre and it's wrong. They want la tigre. I'm so confused.
167
That's entirely possible. I make a lot of mistakes because I can't understand what they're saying even on the slow recording. Thanks!