Now why on earth won’t my spell checker recognise the word back-to-frontness? It seems perfectly valid to me!

In my last blog, Learning Italian: The Back To Front Language! I touched upon the seemingly superfluous articles il, la, i, and le, in phrases such as la mia bici (the my bike): Hai visto la mia bella bici? (Have you seen the my lovely bicycle?) Hai mai conosciuto il mio amico Fabio? (Have you ever met the my friend Fabio?) Yes, translated like that it sounds silly … but then, just as you’ve accepted the outrageousness of the superfluous article, your Italian friend tells you: oddio, mi fa male la testa! (oh god, the head hurts!)

Now wait a minute, did they just tell me that ‘the head hurts’ … ‘the head’ … really? Whatever happened to the possessive adjective ‘my’?

Passengers are requested to fasten their seat belt … the captain has advised us that we’ll be entering strong turbulence … ah yes, yes, yes, again, yes.

Well … I suppose you want some rules now, so that you know when not to use the possessive adjective, don’t you? Well let’s see … in general you need to be aware of the following:

When we use the reflexive pronouns mi, ti, si, ci and vi, or the indirect object pronouns mi, ti, gli/le, ci and vi  (to me, to him/her, to us, to them) we can omit the possessive adjective, e.g. non gli funziona più la machina = his car doesn’t work any more (literally: to him the car doesn’t work any more), mi lavo le mani = I wash my hands (literally: I wash myself the hands), ti fa male la testa? = does your head hurt? (literally: to you it hurts the head?)

N.B. in the above examples I have included the literal translations purely to illustrate the grammatical structure. Please don’t learn them as they’ll only confuse you. It’s best to concentrate on the practical translations: ‘his car doesn’t work’, ‘I wash my hands’ etc.

Some more examples of sentences that omit the possessive adjective (underlined in the English translation):

ti sei fatto male al piede? = have you hurt your foot?
non mi va più l’orologio = my watch doesn’t work any more
attento, mi hai fatto proprio male alla testa! = careful, you really hurt my head!
ti sei lavato le mani? = have you washed your hands?

There are also cases in which the possessive adjective becomes redundant because it’s obvious who the possessor is, e.g.:

hai una mosca sulla testa … ciac … l’ho presa! = you’ve got a fly on your head … whack … I got it!
ha i pantaloni sporchi = his/her trousers are dirty

… or it’s a pretty fair assumption who the possessor is:

posso prendere in prestito la penna? = can I borrow your pen?

Okay, this is the bit where I go off to have a nice break whilst leaving you, dear readers, to wrack you poor brains over this article 😉
As usual, questions and comments are very welcome … a presto.