To express proportional relationships like "the more... the more...", Italian uses a straightforward structure. We will practice this by talking about agriculture and how different factors affect the harvest.
The more... the more...
To say "the more... the more..." in Italian, you use the correlative structure più... più....
Unlike English, which requires a definite article ("the more"), Italian drops the article entirely and simply uses the word più at the beginning of each clause.
| The more fertilizer you use, the more the plants grow. | Più fertilizzante usi, più le piante crescono. |
You can use più to modify nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs, just as you do in English.
| The more tractors we use, the faster we harvest the wheat. | Più trattori usiamo, più velocemente raccogliamo il grano. |
Mixing "più" and "meno"
You can easily substitute più with meno (less/fewer) to create different logical combinations, such as "the more... the less..." or "the less... the more...".
| The more modern a tractor is, the less gas it consumes. | Più un trattore è moderno, meno benzina consuma. |
| The less organic agriculture is used, the more the environment suffers. | Meno si usa l'agricoltura biologica, più l'ambiente soffre. |
Talking about the harvest
When talking about farming, you will often use these structures to describe the cause-and-effect of weather or farming practices on the final crop yield.
| the yield | la resa |
| The less water there is, the more the yield decreases. | Meno acqua c'è, più la resa diminuisce. |
