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matteo tironi.
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Welcome back at Easy Peasy Italian, the easy website where learning the easy Italian ain't easy, afterall 
today's topic is.... spaghetti. Yeah, that not just pasta, it is a specific type of pasta.
You know, many foreigners tend to call pasta pretty much every kind of hard wheat compound that you can somehow boil, but we're rather strict about their name here.
You know, as far as long, thin, spaghetti-like pasta is concerned, I think there are about 5-6 type of pasta. Bucatini, linguine, tagliatelle and many more regional variants.....
yeah, speaking of spaghetti really made me hungry, so I think I'll have some.....
wait? Have some? Have..... ah, that's what I was meant to talk about today, avere
fortunately I managed to remember it in time
avere is the Italian verb for to have, and, even more than essere, its use is very different from the English to have's one.
But let's cover the boring grammar part first, so that we'll get a grasp of it.
So, this is the conjugation in the present simple tense. Pretty much like essere, it is strongly irregular.
Io ho= I have
tu hai= you(singular) have
lui/lei ha= he/she has
noi abbiamo= we have
voi avete= you(plural) have
loro hanno= they have
as you may know, Italian does not have h as a sound, and generally h is used as a modifier for other sounds (check the pronounce articles out once I will have wrote them).
Therefore you mustn't pronounce the h, not at all.
so why is that h there? Because otherwise ho, hai, ha and hanno may end up being confused with some other very common words, o (or), ai (to the (plural) read the article about preposition for more), a (to) and anno (year).
Hence, hai is not pronounced like hay, but more like.... the japanese word ai, love. Yeah, being romantic today
to tell the truth, the “h versions” are not always pronounced like their “hless” relatives.
Ho has an open o, while o has a close o.
Hai has the accent on the a, while ai has the accent on the i.
Ha/a and hanno/anno are the same though.
So, I anticipated earlier that the Italian avere is used quite differently from the English to have.
Both are used as auxiliary and to express possession (pretty obvious), but their idiomatic usage differs.
I'll list the situations in which it is used in Italian and not in English first, then I'll do the contrary.
1) to tell one's age.
In English, we say that someone is X years old, but this is a typical Germanic construction. As far as I know, in all the Romance languages, the verb to have is used instead, and Italian is no exception.
Ho 20 anni. (lit. I have twenty years)
I am twenty years old.
Quanti anni ha? (lit. how many years does she have?)
How old is he/she?
2) to express feelings.
To express feelings, English often employes to be, along with adjectives.
I am hungry.
I am scared.
Italian, on the other hand, uses avere + nouns.
Ho fame (lit. I have hunger)
Hai paura? (lit. do you have fear?)
in certain cases, avere is used in feel's place too.
I feel cold.
I feel sick.
I feel like (doing something)
Ho freddo. (lit. I have cold, and no, it does not mean that one has a cold XD)
Ho la nausea (lit. I have the nausea.)
Ho voglia (di fare qualcosa) (lit. I have will of doing something)
however, feel has a proper counterpart in Italian, sentirsi (reflexive), which is preferred over avere in all cases but I feel sleepy (ho sonno), I feel hot (ho caldo) and I feel cold (ho freddo).
In fact, if you wanted to translate “I feel sick” in a better way, you could have said something like:
Mi sento male (lit. I feel bad, and no, it does not infere any kind of regret or something on that line, just that you are sick/ill)
this is it. Now let's move on to the situations in which Eglish uses to have while Italian does not use avere.
1) in place of to take
in English, phrases like to have a break, to have a shower and to have a vacation are somewhat common, but Italian does not allow avere to take such comforts
yeah, how cruel of us, making avere do the dirty job of conveing our feelings, and then we don't even let it go on vacation.....
all the phrases I wrote before are covered by fare (to do/to make) in Italian.
Fare una pausa
fare la doccia
fare una vacanza
yeah, fare sure is quite the Italian's handyman the article about it's gonna be huge
2)in place of to eat and to drink
In English, one can have food/drinks, while if you said something like
ho avuto un caffè (lit. I had a coffee)
it would sound like you kind of possessed it, but now you have lost it. And yeah, it would be WEIRD.
In this situation, in Italian you can go for two different patters: the “proper” one, using mangiare(to eat)/ bere (to drink), or the prendere (to take one).
Actually, I think the latter would sound better in the contexts in which you would use to have in English.
Let's say a group of friends is deciding what to do, and one of them suggests:
Let's have a pizza.
In Italian, such proposal would definitely be with prendere:
Prendiamo una pizza.
However, if someone asks what you ate yesterday, hardly ever would one answer using prendere (although it is possible), he would use mangiare instead.
3) to express duty. In English, the most commonly used verbs (amongst the gazillion of available ones) to express duty are must and to have to.
In Italian, we only have dovere (must).
However, in a few selected cases one could actually use avere to express duty, in a sentence like this:
I have many things to do.
Yeah, one may argue that you're not directly expressing duty here, because technically you have the things to do they same way you have a dog or something else.
But still, this phrase clearly implies a sort of duty.
Well, this is the only case in which avere means to have to do something in Italian.
Ho molte cose da fare.
DO NOT try using avere in a sentence like this:
I have to meet with him at 9'o clock.
Ho da incontrarmi con lui alle 9 WRONG
well, actually I would understand it because my mother's mother language (Bergamasque) has a very similar structure to express duty, and many people around here would manage to understand you anyway (I do even speak like this at times, with my mother, when we mix up Italian and Bergamasque XD)
But if you travel down the peninsula, less and less people would understand this sentence. And as they already talk like a rabid dog, you won't want to get yourself more difficulties, so stick with dovere (speaking of which, I really ought to write something about Italy's minority languages, as they are much more than simple dialects).
Ok, so to wrap this part up let's finish with some idioms.
Avere in mente qualcosa/di+verb= to be plotting/thinking about/considering something
avevo in mente di aprire un negozio in centro
I was considering opening a shop downtown
Avere a cuore qualcosa = to hold something precious/ to care about something
noi abbiamo a cuore il benessere dei nosti ospiti
we hold our guests' wellness precious.
Avere bisogno= to need
ho bisogno di un maglione nuovo
I need a new sweater.
Avere fegato= to have guts
hai fegato a sfidarmi così
you sure have guts, to challenge me like that.
Avere senso= to make sense (do not use fare senso to say that, fare senso means to be disgusting!!!)
ha senso che tu sia così bravo, dato chi erano i tuoi genitori.
It makes sense that you are that good, given who your parents were.
Avere il presentimento/la sensazione = to have a hunch/feeling
ho il presentimento che questa giornata non finirà bene.
I have a hunch that this day is not going to end well.
Avere cure= to have care
abbi cura del mio libro.
have care of my book.
Avere voglia (di fare)= to feel like doing something
hai voglia di andarci?
Do you feel like going there?
Aversene a male (pronominal verb, see pronouns3)= to have hard feelings/ to get upset.
non avertene a male ma il tuo quadro fa schifo.
no hard feelings but your painting sucks.
Last, but not least, averci.
Averci is a verb used in casual contexts and it basically means..... nothing more than to have.
So what changes? Nothing, it's just that it feels cozy and it warms us up.
Ho una macchina and
c'ho la macchina both mean I have a car. No more, no less.
However, ho una macchina sounds like a robot, while the other form is top-notch spoken (not written) Italian.
The only difference lies in the article. With avere you usually use a (indeterminative article), while with averci you use il/la/lo (the).
Ok, this article ended up being a bit lengthy, but avevo molto da dire (I had lots of thing to say)
in case you have doubts, questions or something, feel free to post them
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avere. level1habemus new article :) about the second most common verb, avere, and its uses. |
