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matteo tironi.
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Welcome to Easy Peasy Italian, the website where Italian is as Easy as a child's play and as Peasy as.... ugh, peas? 
so, today's topic is one of the most basic when facing a new language, pronouns.
In fact, many of you may be like “hell man, there is no need to make a post about them, I could just look'em up online and that's all!”
Maybe. But maybe you don't know that in Italian pronouns, when they are the sentence's subject, are usually understood.
And if you don't know it it means you haven't read my introduction.... which I'd suggest you to read.
So, without any further ado, let's get down to this damn pronouns.
I io we noi
you(singular) tu you(plural) voi
He lui/egli
She lei/ella they loro
It esso/essa
so, I guess I can't say much about io and tu, pretty straightforward.
As you may have noticed, he and she have two forms, the first one I listed is the common one used in spoken Italian and most writing, while the other one is used in formal writing.
You won't come across it any day soon, but you'd better watch out for this double form.
So is it the same for it? Is esso the standard form and essa the weird old-fashioned one?
NO.
As I've already said, Italian despise non-understood pronouns, but the one they despise the most is it. Really, we don't like it, and if you remember well, in certain cases we don't even have a pronoun at all.
well, esso is a masculine it, while essa is a feminine it. Therefore it depends on the object's gender. Unlike other languages, we don't use the same pronoun for objects and people, and esso/essa are for objects only, but you'll hardy ever see them, most of the time they will stick in the shadow of “understoodness”.
Speaking of the third pronoun, in Italian the courtesy pronoun (yeah, we do have one, and to my Italian mind it sounds SO WEIRD when you address someone important or a stranger with you, because it sounds.... disrespectful, you know. Yeah, I know I shouldn't feel like this but I can't help doing it) is Lei, she.
Yeah, we all are some sort of she-male here ahahahah XDXD
well, two thing about Lei as a courtesy pronoun.
First, like the German Sie, Lei is always capitalized, even when it is not the subject of the sentence (and Lei is one of the rare cases in which the pronominal subject is almost always expressed).
Secondly, even though Lei means she, if the people you're addressing is a male, the adjectives are in the masculine form. Really, you should watch out for this.
es.
Lei è un gran maleducato
You are quite the boorish!
Can you see the -o at maleducato's end? It means that the noun is masculine. If I had been addressing a female, it would have been maleducata.
So, that's pretty much all for the singular persons.
About the plural ones, all I have to point out is that we have a special plural version of you, voi.
Well, actually in the past, and in certain contexts, voi is used in place of Lei as a courtesy pronoun, on a French fashion.
But it no longer used this way. At least not in commonly spoken Italian, although some Southern variants still prefer it over Lei.
Moreover, it is used in novels, films and similar when you want to sound old-fashioned, pretty much like the English old thou and thee.
Pronoun, understood or not understood, that's the dilemma!
Ok, so now that we have learnt what the pronouns translate to in Italian, let's see when one should express them.
1) when the pronoun is the courtesy Lei, even in spoken language (usually)
2) when you want to remark a difference.
This one is a bit hard to explain, but in certain contexts one usually would express the pronoun, because it would strengthen a concept or something like that.
Let's say a couple of siblings are fighting over a toy.
The first one has been playing with it for two hours, and now the other one claims the toy to play with it.
In Italian, the scene would sound like this:
A:”fammi giocare con quel gioco”
B:”no”
A:”dai, tu ci hai già giocato per due ore!”
B:”io ci ho giocato solo oggi però!”
A:”let me play with that toy”
B:”no”
A:”come on, you've already been playing with it for two hours!”
B:”I've played with it today only, tough!”
In the third and the fourth sentence the pronominal subjects are expressed, because they want to remark the difference between A (who hasn't played with it yet) and B (who has being playing with it till now). To sum up, B played and A didn't. Difference.
I know, it may be a bit hard to grasp, but let me make another example.
A kid has an aunt that always gives him money, and complains to his mother for not doing the same.
Kid:” la zia mi da sempre dei soldi, tu no”
Mom:”lei è tua zia, e può fare quello che vuole, ma io non ti do così tanti soldi”
Kid:”perchè tu sei tirchia e lei no”
Mom:”io non ti permetto di parlarmi così!”
Kid:”Aunt always give me money, while you don't”
Mom:”she's your aunt, and she can do whatever pleases her, but I won't give you that much money”
Kid:”that's because you're stingy while she isn't”
Mom:”I won't allow you to speak to me like that!”
do you see? I expressed the pronominal subjects quite a few times here, in the second sentence I expressed lei and io(she and, because the mom wants to remark the difference between her and the aunt, who is not her) and io.
In the third, I expressed both tu and lei (because the kid wants to remark that the aunt is not stingy, while the mother is).
As you have noticed, expressed pronouns often come in pairs. I am, she is not. He is, you're not.
Contrast.
However, this is not always true, because in some fixed phrases the pronominal subject must be expressed.
es.
Se lo dici tu.
If you say so.
Sei tu che ci hai fatto perdere!
It is you, who made us lose!
These, and other that I don't remember now, are fixed phrases, and therefore require the pronoun to be said. Of course, one could argue that in this case there is a contrast too (it is you who said so, not someone else), albeit less evident.
With this in mind, you should be able to figure out when using the pronouns and when it's better to leave them out.
now that you have read about this rule, you should be able to see why it is never expressed as a pronoun. you can't really make a contrast between it and something else, when it is impersonal constrcuctions like "it rains". it rains but I don't
I doesn't make sense
so what if it refers to an object? well, in that case, like in English, we use questo and quello (this and that) to make comparison, not it.
3) when the verbs conjugation is ambiguous.
As I said in the previous part, the verb's conjugation usually rules out who is the sentence's subject.
But as a tense (subjunctive) has the same conjugation for all the singular persons, the pronoun is usually expressed to avoid confusion.
Subjunctive is a weird tense used in some subordinate clause that does not matter at all for beginners, so you could even ignore this part altogether, but you'd better keep it in mind when you'll get to study it.
Let's make a couple of example for the sake of clearness anyway.
Che tu lo abbia fatto o meno non cambia niente.
Whether you have done it or not it doesn't really matter.
Anche se io lo avessi fatto, non sarebbe cambiato niente.
Even if I had done it, nothing would have changed.
Ok, let's wrap up this part by summing up a bit:
Italian, unlike English, has both a courtesy pronoun and a plural you version.
Moreover, He and She have two versions, the common one and the bookish one.
It has two versions too, depending on the gender, although it is seldom used.
Pronouns as sentence subjects are almost always omitted, but in three cases: when we're using Lei, the courtesy pronoun, when we want to mark a difference or a contrast, and when we're using the singular persons' subjunctive mood.
Ok, this is it, hopefully you appreciated this over-lengthy lesson about pronouns, let's see you next time with the non-subject pronouns' use. That's gonna be a mess, so be ready
of course, if you have questions, complaints, war declaration to our grammar or similar, feel free to comment
Edited by matteo tironi - 28/9/2014, 15:09
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the pronouns 1, the subject case. level1what the Italian pronouns are and how to use them |
