Professor Dave again, let’s study the verb avere.
We just learned about pronouns, like I and you and they.
And when you use one of these, there are a few verbs that will commonly follow, one of
which is to have.
I have class today.
He has five dollars.
In Italian, to have is avere.
Although we won’t dive into a wide variety of verbs just yet, let’s get into avere
right now.
This verb is irregular and doesn’t follow the pattern of conjugation that we will learn
later, so this particular one has to be memorized.
The basic form of the verb, or the infinitive, avere, is derived from Latin, habere, and
even though the H is gone in the infinitive, it comes back in different forms of the verb.
Let’s conjugate avere now.
Io ho.
I have.
The O is open but the H is silent.
We still need the H, because without it, the letter O simply means “or”, like più
o meno.
Tu hai.
You have.
Again, the H is silent, but without it, this would mean “to the”, as in, io do un biscotto
ai bambini.
Lui ha, or lei ha.
Yet again, the H is silent, but without it, “a” would simply mean “to”, as in:
Io vado a Roma.
Now for the plurals.
Noi abbiamo.
No H on this one.
Then it’s voi avete.
No H here either.
And lastly, loro hanno.
H comes back, because without it, anno means year.
So what are the uses of this verb?
Avere can mean to have as in to own.
Notice that this is second person singular, so this is being asked to one person only.
If asking a couple or family whether they collectively own a cat, you would say:
Beyond this, Italian uses certain idioms that require the verb avere.
In English, we could ask: Are you hungry?
Or one could proclaim: I am hungry.
In English, the hunger is a state of being.
But in Italian, we do not use essere, which means to be.
Instead, we use avere, implying that we have hunger.
In Italian, hunger is something that you have.
Since hunger is a noun, rather than the adjective hungry that we use in English, fame will stay
the same in every usage.
There are all kinds of other conditions we can possess.
In this case, we can use “io”, or not, since the form of the verb we use, ho, implies
first person singular, so it is clear who is thirsty even without the pronoun.
Here are some more.
Or you could even use it to state your age.
So avere is our first taste of verbs and verb conjugation.
We will come back to this later, but before moving to some vocab, let’s check comprehension.