The language trip

The last entry is il programma per il dopo, and the small word at the end of it is doing something English cannot copy. Dopo is an adverb — afterwards, later — and Italian turns it into a noun by putting the article in front of it and doing nothing else at all. Il dopo is the time that follows, a thing one can plan, write down and make a programme for. No suffix, no derivation, no change of shape. The same trick runs right through the language: il prima e il dopo for the before and the after, il perché for the reason, which even takes a plural in i perché dei bambini, il come e il quando for the how and the when, il di più for the bit that is extra. English has nothing so free. We manage « the before and after » of a photograph and « the why » in a headline, and the licence stops about there: « the afterwards » is not a noun anybody writes, and what comes next has to be named by a whole clause instead. The article is the entire machinery, and it costs one word.