Don’t ask me why my odd little mind ended up considering this, but the fact remains that in Italian the word ‘giorno’ – day, is a ‘male’ word, whereas the word for week – ‘settimana’ is female.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why this is the case.
Italian is one of those languages, that, unlike English, defines everything as being either male or female, from a grammatical point of view. Sometimes you can guess that a word will be either female or male, other times, as in the day/week thing, there appears to be no logical explanation or consistency.
Oh well, English has its notoriously devious spelling that bears little relation to pronunciation and Italian likes to catch you out with its odd male and female nouns.
No language is perfect. And before anyone points this out, I know that German nouns defy any reasonable explanation, especially with regard to the neuter gender that is assigned to some words.
Curious, very curious.
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Actually, there is some method in our madness.
A large part of abstract concepts are feminine, as often are collective nouns (groups, sets, or lumps of objects). “Settimana” being both (arbitrary grouping of days), i guess you might expect its grammatical gender (…not, because that’s where an exception to the rule usually lies in wait for you in the dark… but anyway).
Fascinating subject, isn’t this?
To complicate the picture, a change in gender is often made, even with physical objects, to emphasize some difference in usage or size, in contrast to similar and more common objects of the same kind. Expecially with tools, like “cucchiaia”, “mestola”, or “pennellessa”. Looks like they’re all larger versions than the “originals”, and they all are feminine instead of the standard masculine. I don’t know whether you can really draw a rule out of that, though.
Ciao/bye!
Ciao/Hi Enri,
Many thanks for explaining the ‘method in the madness’!
I had not realised that many abstract concepts and collective nouns were feminine in Italian. That is very interesting – I shall be reading Italian more analytically as a result.
As for exceptions to rules, English, as you may well know is littered with them, whereas Italian appears to be a little more straightforward generally. And this means that the exceptions stand out more, and are easier to take into account.
And yes, I agree, this is a fascinating subject
“To complicate the picture, a change in gender is often made, even with physical objects, to emphasize some difference in usage or size, in contrast to similar and more common objects of the same kind.”
Again, this is something I did not really know, nor can I explain why this should be the case. Odd, but interesting.
I suppose my questions are down to the fact that I acquired my own knowledge of Italian either from the street, dictionaries or from an number of ‘teach yourself’ books, as well as from teaching English!
Can you recommend a good grammar of the Italian language – not a basic one, but something that goes into the origins of the language? Either in Italian or English.
Understanding how languages have evolved is something which I’d like to know more about, and I have read a couple or so of fascinating books on the evolution of English and language in general and one was ‘The Language Instinct’ by Steven Pinker.
However, I’d love to read more about the evolution of modern Italian. I know a little about this, but not a whole lot, alas.
Thanks for your comment.
Kind regards,
Alex
I’m afraid I can’t help you with the suggestion of a grammar book, good or otherwise, as I really have no background in linguistics whatsoever. Aside from middle- and hi-school textbooks, the only book on the subject I happened to have read (and not even the whole of it, only a few parts and excerpts) is Luca Serianni’s “Grammatica Italiana”, and while it did seem good to me, that was strictly from a layman’s point of view, and I’m not sure it would cover the subtleties that might interest you, nor specifically the history of the language.
Back to genders: mine above wasn’t really meant to be a very scientific statement, about the frequency of feminine abstract nouns. As a matter of fact it was as loose and unscientific as it gets! The only thing that may come to its support is my “feeling” as a native speaker, which is not exactly hard fact.
I’m actually rather curious myself to know if other speakers of Italian share my impressions.
However, I observe that many (most?) of the common suffixes that make up abstract notions (-tà, -zione, -zia/ézza, -ìa, -ata) are indeed feminine, and so are several “collective” suffixes (-aglia?); I don’t have statistics on this though. Perhaps could this somehow have an influence on how we perceive grammatical gender in ambiguous cases? It might be interesting to have some sort of experiment on this… possibly over the assimilation into Italian of foreign words, when there is no clear italian equivalent or template to adhere to. What gender is given to the new words then?
(Uhm, now maybe the question got me carried away a little.)
Anyway, when I was talking about rules i did only half-seriously, because I’m not aware of any rule that could have any predictive power over grammatical gender… It was totally post-hoc, so to speak.
I looked up “The Language Instinct”, and it looks very interesting. Now it’s definitely on my reading list. I’m quite curious about language, expecially about its inner workings, and those seem the main subject of the book.
And, speaking of interesting readings. I have to thank you for this blog! I’ve been following it for a while, and I find it… well, educational and instructive, to say the least. A good resource to practice and improve my English and at the same time an enlightning look at cultural differences.
In fact, now I’m planning to follow the advice you gave readers in a past artcle, to improve one’s comprehension of the spoken language by listening regularly to tv and podcasts: comprehension is still one of my biggest problems with English.
By the way, you might be wrong believing English spelling is difficult. I actually find it (with due exceptions) quite easy and rather logical. It’s the pronunciation of English that’s a dreadful nightmare!
Best regards,
Enrico
Hi again Enrico,
Even if you may think your comprehension is a little weak, I can assure you that your vocabulary is excellent and your ability to write in English is impressive too. I wish I could write anywhere near as well in Italian!
How did you learn to write like this?? A very good teacher, or some other secret to your success?
As for your explanations being ‘from a layman’, I don’t think this makes much difference. It’s not so much who makes the observations as the observations he or she makes that count in my not so humble opinion.
I shall check out the book you suggested, and have a hunt around on Amazon for some alternatives – and I’ll pop ‘The Language Instinct’ in my shops too.
“Anyway, when I was talking about rules i did only half-seriously, because I’m not aware of any rule that could have any predictive power over grammatical gender… It was totally post-hoc, so to speak.”
‘post-hoc’! Love it! Never heard that before, but I shall add it to my vocabulary!
Hopefully someone else will be able to corroborate your opinion regarding all those feminine abstract notions. I’ll have a think about it too, and see if I can find any exceptions, out of curiosity. Your observation may well help me to understand which words should be feminine, which is useful.
Thanks for saying that you find this blog interesting. It’s comments like yours that keep me going:) And many thanks for reading.
Now, to your comprehension first and then the pronunciation.
As you have managed to discover from one of my other posts, watching TV regularly can really help develop your comprehension, and the more you manage to watch and the more often you manage to watch, the better your comprehension will become, in the same way as people who go and live in an English speaking country find that they understand much more after what may only be a relatively short stay. It’s all down to ‘exposure’ to the language.
However, if you really want to develop your comprehension to the highest possible level, you need to start by just watching and not concentrating too much, and then, once you think you can catch the sense of most dialogues, start attempting to identify all the words that are being spoken – just a little at first. And, possibly at the same time as you being listening for more detail, start listening to the sound of the language – the intonation and the ‘melody’ – this will help you to understand more meaning than the words alone convey.
Try it and let me know how you get on.
As for English pronunciation, as I always say to my students, ‘It’s not the pronunciation per se that is difficult, it is knowing the correct pronunciation of English words.’ The more your hear English, you more your brain will pick up the patterns and sooner or later you should find that you can make two or three guesses at the pronunciation of a word, and one should be right.
Another thing that can be of great assistance in the learning of English pronunciation, is the phonetic alphabet. You know, that odd collection of strange letter-like symbols that follow most entries for words in dictionaries.
If you go here:
http://www.englishisin.com/content/section/12/167/
which is my, er, company site, you will find a .pdf guide to the phonetic system that you can download and print off in colour. It should help you become more familiar with the system, which is extremely useful and can really help you to hit the right pronunciation first time.
And if you’d like a book on the subject, then the Cambridge English Pronunciation dictionary with CD ROM, which I have, is excellent, and is in the UK Shop under Imparare L’inglese – Learning English >
Useful books for English language learners section. And it should cost less bought from Amazon.co.UK than from a bookshop here in Italy, always assuming that you are in Italy, that is (I sometimes get myself in a little trouble for assuming too much!).
All the best,
Alex
Enrico made a really interesting observation about the femminity of abstract, conceptual nouns! I’m going to be paying closer attention from now on.
For real mind-benders, how about LA mano? IL uovo, as opposed to LE uova??? ARGH!!!
A hundred years ago when I first arrived here, speaking only NooYawk English and my first language, Spanish, I figured that picking up Italian would be a breeze. All I’d have to do was watch a lot of tv and listen to a lot of radio. The result was that I could hold a fine conversation as long as my part in it consisted only of advertising jingles. “AiiiiME! I piatti toccano sempre a me!!! NELSON PIATTI per un pulito piu’ pulito!” Well that was going nowhere fast, so I enrolled in a crash course at the Istituto Dante Alighieri in Roma. Worked like a charm, though my frustration with the other american students had me grating my last nerves. There were two girls who just couldn’t get it into their heads why some things are boys and other things are girls. “What’s so girly about a window?” they would whine. When the teacher finally lost her cool, she told them to stop wondering and just LEARN! Ha!
But English is devilish too. I tutored kids for a while, way back when. Try explaining the pronunciations of ‘through’, ‘bough’ and ‘enough’!
Hey Enrico, I agree – Alex runs a wonderful blog!
Hi Gege’,
“For real mind-benders, how about LA mano? IL uovo, as opposed to LE uova??? ARGH!!!”
Yes, I knew about those particular little oddities!
“There were two girls who just couldn’t get it into their heads why some things are boys and other things are girls. “What’s so girly about a window?” they would whine.When the teacher finally lost her cool, she told them to stop wondering and just LEARN! Ha!”
I do the same thing with many of my students – it’s far too easy to end up picking holes in a language and wasting valuable conversation time trying to understand why things are the way they are. But I used to do the same, and still do to an extent, although I really started to learn when I stopped questioning and started speaking.
The best thing to do is to accept the differences, learn to speak etc and then, once you are really fluent, then you can start looking into the subtleties, which are, at least for me, interesting. And I’ve written a bit about this on this blog.
As for the pronunciation of dear old English, well, that’s worthy of its very own blog!
And how come your first language is Spanish, Gege’?
“Hey Enrico, I agree – Alex runs a wonderful blog!”
Blush, and thanks!
Kind regards,
Alex
These “oddities” have almost the same explanation. Modern Italian essentially come from “latinus vulgaris” id est latin of common people.
For example in latin “horse” is “equus” in italian instead is “cavallo” that comes from “caballus”, caballus was a powerful draft horse used by farmers during roman times.
An other example is “bello”. In latin the word for beautyfull is “pulcher” but in italian is “bello” that comes from “bellus”<-"benulus"<-"bonus". Moreover, In latin "bellum" means "war", but in Italian war is "guerra" that comes from old south-germanic idiom "werra".
The fact that some english words seem to be closer to latin than italian, come from the other fact that italian descends from latin spoken by people day by day, whereas latin-derived words of english language come from old french and literary language of Cicero, Caesar, Sallustius and so on.
Thanks for the explanation, Minghin. Languages evolve in mysterious ways.
“The fact that some english words seem to be closer to latin than italian, come from the other fact that italian descends from latin spoken by people day by day, whereas latin-derived words of english language come from old french and literary language of Cicero, Caesar, Sallustius and so on.”
English is an amalgam of many languages. Latin was the language of the Roman Catholic church in England, French was the language of diplomacy and when you add in all the empire influences, it becomes very complicated indeed. The fact that the English have always been great seafarers has added more than a few words to English as well! Remember too that the Romans once dominated the UK and certain place names come from Roman – London is but one.
Put this all together and you have a language which is difficult to know how to pronounce – as my Italian students of English know only too well! One single English word may contain chunks of pronunciation taken from more than one language. Once you gain some familiarity with English, working out how words should be pronounced becomes easier.
Books can, and have, been written about how English has evolved and they make for fascinating reading – I know, I’ve read a few.
Thanks for commenting.
Best,
Alex