Study and training

Il voto finale si scrive in centodecimi is the sentence on this list that no literal English will carry across. English states a mark as two whole numbers with a preposition wedged between them: twenty-eight out of thirty, a hundred and ten out of a hundred and ten. Italian can do that as well — ventotto su trenta — but its own habit is to turn the scale itself into a noun. The suffix -esimo, which builds the ordinals decimo and trentesimo, also builds the names of fractions, so un trentesimo is one thirtieth of something. A mark is then simply how many of those fractions have been earned: ventotto trentesimi, twenty-eight thirtieths. A university degree is graded in centodecimi, in one-hundred-and-tenths, because a hundred and ten is the top of that particular ladder. The whole scale is named once, in a single word, and any number put in front of it is counting that word. This is why un esame in trentesimi and una laurea in centodecimi name a system without naming anybody’s result, where English has no such noun and must spell the fraction out in full every time it opens its mouth.