Question
Aggiornato il
Mark314
20 giu 2021

  • Inglese (Stati Uniti)
  • Italiano
  • Spagnolo (Messico)
Domanda chiusa
Domande Italiano

Can some please explain why "Se mi fossi messa un cappotto" translates to "if I had put on a coat"? It looks more like "if you were me mass a coat"... which doesn't make sense... !

Risposte
Condividi questa domanda
Leggi ulteriori commenti
__marti__
20 giu 2021

  • Italiano

“Messa” is “mettere” at the infinitive form and has the same meaning of “indossare”, it may seem like mass but it means another thing 😂

bluegirl__
20 giu 2021

  • Italiano

Perché "messa" è il participio passato del verbo "mettere". "Se mi fossi messa" equivale a "se avessi messo" che significa "indossare" e in inglese mettere qualcosa/indossare si dice "put on" oppure "wear"

0 likes
francescoghg
21 giu 2021

  • Inglese (Regno Unito) Quasi esperto
  • Italiano

Italian, just like English, has many words that are written the same but have several meanings. Like, "I go to mass" (oh, like, gravitational mass ?) 😜 To a non native eyes, these can of course be confusing, but rest assured that no Italian would make that mistake. It's like the sentence "did you book a table ?". One could say "but it sounds like the paper-filled object", but the structure of the sentence and the context make you think of "book" as a verb, not a noun. The same happens here: there's "essere" as an auxiliary verb + the reflexive pronoun "mi", so it needs a past participle, and when I hear "messa" I think of it as a verb (mettersi "to put on"), not a noun. It's just the way the brain is wired to understand the language, you should start focusing on hearing and understanding the whole sentence rather than word by word 🙂

As for the "you were", that's because the subjunctive has the same form for 1st and 2nd singular persons (che io fossi - che tu fossi), but it's not confusing in this case because "mettersi" is a reflexive verb, and "mi fossi" is unmistakably referring to "I put the coat on myself", whereas "ti fossi" is for (singular) you.

0 likes
Utente esperto
Mark314
21 giu 2021

  • Inglese (Stati Uniti)
@francescoghg I really like that advice about not trying to parse every sentence word by word! Of course that's not how we "hear" in our native language. I will definitely use that tip. Thanks! And, it's obvious now to me about "mettersi" but I hadn't seen that conjugation of it before. Also I didn't realize "fossi" was same 1st and 2nd person. Everything cleared up now. Grazie mille!
[Novità] Ehi tu! Dico a te che stai imparando una lingua!

Sai come migliorare le tue abilità linguistiche❓ Basta far correggere ciò che scrivi da un madrelingua!
Con HiNative, puoi ricevere correzioni su ciò che scrivi da utenti madrelingua gratis ✍️✨.
Registrazione
Condividi questa domanda
Can some please explain why "Se mi fossi messa un cappotto" translates to "if I had put on a coat"? It looks more like "if you were me mass a coat"... which doesn't make sense... !
domande simili
Domande suggerite
Newest Questions (HOT)
Domande Recenti
Domanda precedente/successiva

Fai domande a utenti madrelingua gratis

Registrati gratis
hinative app preview balloon background image flying monga
  1. HiNative
  2. Can some please explain...