[Psychonaut]

I'll be touring Italy starting next week and I wanted to make a t-shirt before I went. I'm wondering if a MacNNer who speaks Italian could proofread it for me:

Front:
Io sono
profugo
politico
dall'America.

Back:
Posso dormire
sul Suo divano
per quattro anni?


Thanks.

[historylme]

That's funny.

But why or, can you explain the back text?


and sorry, I don't speak Italian.

[tooki]

In Italian, the personal pronoun is only used to emphasize the subject.

What I think you want the front to say is "I am a political refugee from America", but what you wrote is closer to "I, not you, not him, not that guy over yonder, am a political refugee from America". (It's just about the emphasis.) To say the former, just leave out the "io" -- in Italian, the person is already conveyed in the conjugation of the verb.

The back says "Can I sleep on your couch for four years?"

tooki

[Psychonaut]

Originally posted by history1me:
That's funny.

But why or, can you explain the back text?


and sorry, I don't speak Italian.

Well, it's four years until the next election. Kind of like, "wake me up when it's all over."

Mille grazie, Tooki! I was kind of wondering that myself.

[Oisín]

Originally posted by Psychonaut:
Well, it's four years until the next election. Kind of like, "wake me up when it's all over."

Or, if it's the right person, "can I stay on your couch for the next four years? I promise we wouldn't have to waste a moment of it on sleep"

But yeah, apart from getting rid of the io, I don't see anything wrong with it either. Then again, I don't really speak Italian good enough to be much of a judge on that

[historylme]

Originally posted by Psychonaut:
Well, it's four years until the next election. Kind of like, "wake me up when it's all over."

Mille grazie, Tooki! I was kind of wondering that myself.

That makes sense, four more years of the same. Cool beans.

[paul w]

Originally posted by Psychonaut:
I'll be touring Italy starting next week and I wanted to make a t-shirt before I went. I'm wondering if a MacNNer who speaks Italian could proofread it for me:

Front:
Io sono
profugo
politico
dall'America.

Back:
Posso dormire
sul Suo divano
per quattro anni?


Thanks.

I would change per quatro anni to "i prossimi quatr'anni" (the next four years).

And just say "sul divano" the suo (tuo or vostro is understood).

Thus my version would be:

Io
sono un
profugo
politico
americano

Posso
dormire
sul divano
per i prossimi
quattr'anni?


EDIT: io is not always used for emphasis, as an Italian explained to me, sometimes it just helps to open the mouth a bit, more comfortable to to start a sentence with.

Buon viaggio!

Oops! there needs to be an UN between sono and profugo.

[Oisín]

Originally posted by paul w:
EDIT: io is not always used for emphasis, as an Italian explained to me, sometimes it just helps to open the mouth a bit, more comfortable to to start a sentence with.

It's the same as with the Spanish 'yo' - at least I think it is. You have to learn to get a feeling for when you would use it and when you wouldn't. My gut feeling (which is Spanish, not Italian) tells me that in this sentence, it would sound more natural to not use it; but, of course, that might very well be different in Italian.