Language/Italian/Grammar/Articles

DEFINITE AND INDEFINITE ARTICLES IN ITALIAN

WHAT'S AN ARTICLE

If you come from a language which does not use articles, these grammar elements could be quite difficult to understand.

An article is a word that marks a noun, giving the listener or the reader an important information about how specific or known this noun is, or, on the other hand, how general or unknown it is.

In fact, there are two main kinds of them: the definite articles, usually used to mark specific and known things, and the indefinite articles, usually used to mark general and unknown things. A third kind of articles is also used to mark a part or a certain amount of a thing, that is to say the partitive articles.

Articles are a variable part of the sentence and must be inflected according to gender and number. They are usually put immediately before the noun: sometimes (not so often really), an adjective or a very short little description can stand between the article and its noun.

However, not every noun should always be marked with an article: sometimes it must not be used.

Let us see how articles work in Italian.

DEFINITE ARTICLES

Definite articles are called "Articoli determinativi" in Italian and are the most variable ones. They come from Latin demonstrative adjectives like "those" or "that" and have the purpose to mark specific and well known things. In fact a noun is usually preceded by a definite article:

• when we mean a precise speciment of a concept/noun
• when we mean something we've already desbribed before
• when the thing we are talking about is already well known by the listener
• when the listener or the reader is already able to visualize in his or her head the precise thing we are talking about

For example: if I say "MELA" (meaning "apple") any of us will get a picture of an apple on its mind: but what is it like? Big or small? Green or red? Can I give a context to this apple in some way? I will never be sure.

Saying "LA MELA" (where "LA" is an article and means "THE") means giving "a context" to "apple" which has to be obvious to the listener or the reader: in this case we have a precise image of "the" apple we are talking about, or we know the context in which this "apple" is considered. One of the most important role of a definitive article is to bring the listener or the reader to think of a specific and contextualized concept, and not "one of the many possible specifiment of that concept".

You could almost imagine the definite articles to stand in place of a sentence like "the well known ..." or "the already mentioned..." or even "the one we've already talked about..." etc.

Definite articles are also used to mark the gender of a word and should always be used when learning a new one, not to forget its gender. In fact there are two genders for nouns in Italian and the same two genders for articles: a masculine noun needs a masculine article and a feminine noun needs a feminine article.

Plus, articles also mark the number of a noun, singular or plural: a singular noun needs a singular article, a plural noun needs a plural article.

So, if we could put all this information inside a table it would be like this:

DEFINITE ARTICLES
		NUMBER
		Singular	Plural
GENDER	Masculine	IL, LO	I, GLI
	Feminine	LA	LE

So, masculine singular nouns get two masculine singular articles: "IL" or "LO"; masculine plural nounes get the plural masculine "I" or "GLI". Feminine singular nouns need the feminine article "LA", while feminine plural nouns need the feminine plural "LE".

As you can see, masculine nouns ar a bit trickier than the feminine ones: while for the latter we just use one article per number, mascluine nouns can use two of them. What article should be used, though?

MASCULINE ARTICLES

First of all it is important to remember that the Italian language does not have a neuter gender and that IL or LO and I or GLI are 100% masculine.

In order to choose the correct masculine article, we should start analyzing the sound the following word begins with. In fact certain sounds cannot stay with article IL and some others cannot stay with article LO.

Plus, notice I wrote "word" and not "noun": in fact, as an article usually stays right before its noun, we could think that a certain noun always requires the same article. However, if I put an adjective between the article and the noun (and in same cases it is correct to do that) I could find myself with a different sound right after the article, which could need to change in order to respect the rule of the sound I mentioned before.

Let us start from LO:

LO must be used before:

• S + Consonant, like before sounds /sk/, /sp/, /st/, /sf/, /zg/, /zb/, /zd/, /sv/, /zm/, /zn/, /zl/, /zr/
• S + C when they create sound /ʃ/
• Z, whether it is pronounced /ts/ or /dz/
• GN /ɲ/
• P + Consonant like in /pt/, /pn/, /ps/: these case are very rare in Italian and come mostly from Greek
• Words beginning with X, pronounced like /ks/ (very rare in Italian)
• Words beginning with J, I or Y pronounced as a half vowel /j/ (like "Yesterday")
• Words beginning with a vowel: in which case LO turns into L' (L + apostrophe)

Let us make a few example:

LO SCOIATTOLO --> the squirrel

LO SQUALO --> the shark

LO SPORCO --> the dirt

LO SCIENZIATO --> the scientist

LO ZIO --> the uncle

LO ZUCCHERO --> the sugar

LO ZAINO --> the backpack /rucksack

LO GNOMO --> the gnome

LO PSICOLOGO --> the psychologist

LO PENUMATICO --> the tire

LO IATO --> the hiatus

LO YOGURT --> the yogurt

LO XILOFONO --> the xylophone

L'ORSO --> the bear

L'ALBERO --> the tree

L'IDOLO --> the idol

L'AIUTO --> the aid / help

In any other case, the correct article is IL:

IL CANE --> the dog

IL GATTO --> the cat

IL PROBLEMA --> the problem

IL PORTONE --> the (big) door

IL TUONO --> the thunder

IL BRACCIO --> the arm

IL SUONO --> the sound

IL SILENZIO --> the silence

etc.

In order to better explain how the article isn't strictly connected to the noun, let me show you the following example:

IL CASO --> the case:

Since the word doesn't need the LO article, the right one is IL for exclusion. This noun is used inside the title of a famous book by Robert Louis Stevenson "The strange case of doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde". The Italian translation of this title is literal: "LO strano caso del dottor Jekyll e Mister Hyde". Even if saying "IL CASO" is correct since after the article we find the sound /ka/, once we put another word between them we need to riconsider things: STRANO (meaning "strange") begins with /st/ and befor S + consonant we need to use article LO. Thus we say IL CASO (the case), but LO STRANO CASO (the strange case).

So don't make the mistake of thinking that one article is "more masculine" than the other, or even that one article is neuter and the other is masculine.

Letter H represents a special case. Since almost no word beginns with an H in Italian (except for some conjugations of the verb "to have" which is pointless to mark with an article), the words that have an H as first letter are usually loan words. Even if in their origin language the H is pronounced, in Italian they are considered as words beginning with the following letter, which usually is a vowel. Let us see these examples:

HOBBY /'ob:i/

HOTEL /o'tɛl/

HORROR /'or:or/

HABITAT /'abitat/

HABITUÉ /abitu'e/

HARAKIRI /ara'kiri/

HOST /'ɔst/

HOTSPOT /ɔtspɔt/

All these words are now part of the Italian language but they are all mispronounced according to the Italian phonetics. It is highly probable that foreign words get into the Italian language keeping the original gender, but they get the masculine gender if the origin language sees them as neuter or genderless, espacially if they come from English (and these example are all masculine in fact),. If we needed to give an article to these words it would be L' (L + apostrophe), as if they all began with a vowel.

L'HOBBY, L'HOTEL, L'HORROR, L'HOST etc.

There is an exception, though, that happened relatively recently: the movie "The Hobbit" by Peter Jackson has been traslated with "LO HOBBIT". More and more people are making the effort of pronouncing the H in foreign words and are realising that is quite impossible to pronounce /lh/ at the beginning of a word, so they kept the "O" of LO to pronounce /lo'hɔb:it/. This is just an exception for now, though: the rules say you should us L' before words starting with H + vowel.

-- work in progress --