Posts tagged italian

Dropping Your Vowels

Sometimes in Italian it is necessary to drop vowels from the end of words when the next word begins with a vowel: e.g.

la Italia  becomes l’Italia

la inquinamento becomes l’inquinamento

questo anno becomes quest’anno

Where the last vowel of the article is dropped, an apostrophe seperates the remaining letter from the next word. 

Where other words are concerned, an apostrophe is not used, but the words instead are spaced apart. The vowel must still be dropped when these words are placed before a masculine noun (usually ending in o): grande, bello, santo, quello, buono. 

Examples:

un buono uomo becomes un buon uomo

un grande finale becomes un gran finale

Vowels are also dropped for male titles e.g.:

il signore Rosa becomes il signor Rosa

il dottore Verde becomes il dottor Verde

I will be posting some short tips on how to improve your Italian, here’s the first:

Use of Capitals

Don’t use capitals for days of the week, months, nationalities or personal pronouns (I, we etc.) Unless these words happen to be at the beginning of a sentence of course!

e.g. Lunedi lunedi

      Dicembre  dicembre 

      Francese  francese

Italians don’t capitalise these words, so not doing so will make your writing more authentic. It sounds simple, but is something that is easy to forget given how accustomed we are to capitalising these words! 

:-)

x

Today’s letter: A

Active - a form of the verb that is used when the subject of the sentence does the action

Adverb - a word used with verbs to give information 

Agreement - the matching of words or word endings to the person or thing they refer to. For example, the verb has to be has different forms for I, you and he/she is. In languages verbs may need to be used in the form matched to the person doing the action, and articles and adjectives have masculine, feminine and plural forms to agree with the noun.

Article - a word such as the, a and an which goes with the nouns: the house, an apple

Auxiliary Verb - a verb such as be, have and do that is used with a main verb to form tenses, negatives and questions. 

(Information from Collins easy learning verbs)

Enya x

You use the future tense to express “what will happen”.
To form the future of regular -are, -ere and -ire verbs, you must first remove the -e of the infinitive ending.
(For verbs with the ending -are, change the “a” to an “e”.)
Then add the future ending to the stem of the verb.
For verbs in the form io/lui/lei, note there is a grave accent on the end letter.
(NOTE: Essere is the only verb whose future stem is irregular.)

The future endings:
io - ó
tu - ai
lui/lei - á
noi - emo
voi - ete
loro - anno

Examples
Parlare           Vendere           Finire
Parleró           Venderó           Finiró
Parlerai          Venderai           Finirai
Parlerá           Venderá           Finirá
Parleremo       Venderemmo     Finiremi
Parlerete        Venderete        Finirete
Parleranno      Venderanno      Finiranno