Italian VS English Concordance Rules by Gustav Fagerström

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A few weeks ago, a Facebook user posted the following question regarding Italian grammar:

“Could any Italian speaker tell me why FIAT stands for Fabbrica Italiana Autombili Torino and not Torina (if the concordance is with fabbrica) or Torini (if the concordance is with automobili)?”

In this case, Torino is the name of the city of Turin, so it does not bend, but let’s have a deeper look into the difference between concordance rules in the Italian and English language.

Gustav Fagerström certainly posted the best answer to that question. Check it out:

“As a speaker of both Italian and English, but with neither one as my mother tongue, I have always been fascinated with demonyms (like Torinese, New Yorker, or Bostonian) and how they are constructed across different languages.

As a difference between English and Italian, the Italian demonym is almost always identical to the adjective referring to the place. Torinese means person from Turin/Torino, and it also means “of Turin”. Romano means person from Rome/Roma, and it also means “of Rome”. And Parmigiano means person from Parma and also of Parma, etc. The same thing is rarely true in English. The extra level of embellishment brought on by speaking about the San Franciscan hills or the Bostonian suburbs is in daily language almost invariably scrapped in favour of a simple “of” preposition. However, while it would arguably be an error of form to use either of the above outside a poem, it would not be grammatically incorrect. For instance, to say “the New Yorker streets” instead of “the streets of New York” is, by contrast, simply incorrect grammar.

That same relationship does not apply in Italian, where all demonyms are also legit adjective forms of a place (as far as I am aware). To further make things interesting, since Italian has genders and English only one, the type of demonym/adjective in Italian sometimes allows for it to be gendered both when it is used as a demonym and as an adjective. A man from Rome and a masculine gender object “of Rome” would both be “romano” (pl. -i) whereas a woman and a feminine object from Rome are “romana” (pl. -e). As far as I am aware, the same is not true for the -ese demonym/adjective form. So, the woman, man or object of either gender from Turin all remain “torinese” and all plural forms are “torinesi” (the same goes for milanese/-i, genovese/-i, and so on).

So, if we presume that O.P. is an English native speaker, the confusion is understandable. The New York Times could possibly be called The Times of New York, which would grammaticaly not be wrong (albeit perhaps ill-advised marketing) but would hardly be able to pass as The New Yorker Times, so in this case the situation simply does not translate directly. In my opinion, in the case of FIAT it would not be at all an unreasonable proposition for the acronym to mean “Italian Automobile Factory of Turin”, at which point in Italian it would go “Torinese” (it would refer to Fabbrica, which is feminine gender but the -ese adjective form does not gender-bend, as explained in the previous paragraph). So O.P. was simply not aware firstly that the name refers to the toponym rather than its adjective form, and secondly, that this particular adjective form does not follow gender but only singular and plural. Had the factory been, for instance, “of Rome”, then in fact it would have been “Fabbrica […] Romana” plain and simple. “

From a Facebook post by Gustav Fagerström.

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