Breakdown of Il ventesimo partecipante ha ricevuto un regalo speciale.
un
a / an (masculine)
il regalo
the gift
avere
to have
ricevere
to receive
Questions & Answers about Il ventesimo partecipante ha ricevuto un regalo speciale.
How do we make ventesimo out of the number twenty (venti)?
To form ordinals from 11 onwards, you drop the final vowel of the base number and add -esimo. So, venti loses its final -i and adds -esimo, giving us ventesimo.
If the participant were a woman, would ventesimo change?
Yes! Ordinal numbers ending in -esimo behave like regular adjectives ending in -o. For a female participant, you would change both the article and the ordinal number to feminine: la ventesima partecipante.
How can we tell if partecipante is masculine or feminine here, since it ends in -e?
Why doesn't speciale end in -o to match the masculine noun un regalo?
Speciale belongs to a group of adjectives that always end in -e in their singular form, regardless of whether the noun they describe is masculine or feminine. It only changes when made plural, becoming speciali.