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Questions & Answers about Quel ghiacciaio, che nessuno aveva mai visto, riflette la luna.
Why is quel used instead of quello in front of ghiacciaio?
Italian has different forms of the masculine singular demonstrative adjective before consonants. You use quel before a plain consonant (b, c, d, f, g, etc.), and quello only before s + consonant, z, gn or ps. Since ghiacciaio begins with a hard g, quel is the correct short form.
Why are there commas around che nessuno aveva mai visto?
Those commas mark a nonrestrictive (non-defining) relative clause. It adds extra information about quel ghiacciaio rather than identifying which glacier you mean. In Italian nonrestrictive clauses are set off by commas. If you remove them, it becomes a restrictive clause and slightly shifts the nuance.
Why is che the relative pronoun here? Could I use cui or il quale instead?
Che is the general relative pronoun for both subjects and direct objects without a preceding preposition. Here che stands for ghiacciaio, the direct object of vedere in the subordinate clause.
- You would use cui only after a preposition (e.g. di cui, su cui).
- You can replace che with the more formal il quale (agreeing in gender and number):
Quel ghiacciaio, il quale nessuno aveva mai visto, riflette la luna.
Why doesn’t the sentence use non together with nessuno?
Nessuno is a negative pronoun meaning “nobody.” When it functions as the subject, you drop non because nessuno already carries the negation. Adding non would be an unnecessary double negative (though Italian allows stacked negatives, it’s not used in this pattern).
Why is the verb in the subordinate clause aveva visto (pluperfect) and not ha visto or vede?
Italian uses the pluperfect (trapassato prossimo) to talk about an action completed before another reference point (here, the present moment of “reflecting the moon”).
- aveva visto = “had seen,” stressing that up until now nobody ever saw the glacier.
- ha visto (passato prossimo) would simply say “has seen” at a specific past moment.
- vede (present) wouldn’t match the intended “before now” meaning.
Why is mai placed between aveva and visto?
In compound tenses Italian adverbs of time (mai, sempre, ancora) normally come between the auxiliary verb and the past participle. Hence aveva mai visto is the standard order.
Could we remove the commas and treat che nessuno aveva mai visto as a restrictive clause?
Yes. Without commas it becomes restrictive, specifying exactly which glacier:
Quel ghiacciaio che nessuno aveva mai visto riflette la luna.
The grammar is correct, but you lose the “extra-info” aside feel and turn it into “that nobody had ever seen.”
Why is there no preposition before la luna in riflette la luna?
When riflettere means “to reflect” (as in mirror an image), it’s a transitive verb and takes a direct object without a preposition. If you meant “to think over,” you’d use riflettere su.
How do I pronounce ghiacciaio, and why is there gh?
Gh before i or e signals a hard g sound /g/ (not the soft /dʒ/). So ghiacciaio is pronounced roughly /ɡjakˈkjaːjo/. Without the h it would be /dʒjakˈkjaːjo/, which isn’t intended.