Breakdown of L'acquirente è un nostro caro amico.
essere
to be
l'amico
the friend
caro
expensive, dear
nostro
our
Questions & Answers about L'acquirente è un nostro caro amico.
Why is caro placed before amico instead of after it?
In English we say "a friend of ours", but the Italian is literally "a our dear friend" (un nostro caro amico). Is this the normal structure?
Yes! In Italian, you can put the indefinite article (un, una) right before a possessive word to mean "a [noun] of mine/yours/ours". So un nostro amico is the standard way to say "a friend of ours". If you used the definite article (il nostro caro amico), it would mean "our dear friend" (referring to a specific person).
How do we know the gender of the noun acquirente?
The word acquirente can be either masculine or feminine. Many nouns ending in -ente (like cliente) have the exact same form for men and women. Since it starts with a vowel, both use L' in the singular. We only know this buyer is a man because the rest of the sentence uses masculine words: un, nostro, caro, and amico. If the buyer were a woman, the sentence would end with una nostra cara amica.