Person and family

Il vicino looks like one vocabulary item and is really two. Left bare, the word measures distance: mio zio abita vicino says only that the walk is short, and vicino a works as a preposition, vicino alla stazione, next to the station. Put an article in front of that same form and it stops being a measurement and becomes a person: il vicino is the man next door, la vicina the woman, i vicini di casa the people on the same landing. English keeps the two jobs in two unrelated words, « near » and « neighbour », so a reader has no reason to suspect that one Italian word covers both, and will look the second one up as if it were new. The working rule is short: bare vicino is about space, il vicino names somebody. The same move is available elsewhere on this list — il giovane out of giovane, il vecchio out of vecchio — and it is one of the cheapest ways Italian has of making a noun. An article is all it takes to turn a quality into a person.