"Chi glieli ha dati?" Who gave them to you?"

I wonder why “Who gave them to him?” rings a better bell instead.

I would have written “Chi te li ha dati?” for “them to you”.

Cosa ne pensi?

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When you type “chi glieli ha dati” in reverso it gives you two choices : “who gave them to you” and the one at the bottom as a machine translation as “who gave it to him”. Personally I would go to a good grammar book to consult on this one.

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I don’t have my grammar at hand, but my take is that glieli can stand for both le + li and gli +li, so it works for to him/her/them/(formal) you.

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So, how do you know if it is him/her/them/ or formal you if glieli applies to all of them? Never mind, I will make a collection of sentences with glieli in them and see if they make sense when playing them en masse. Never mind again , there only two sentences with glieli in all of CM. So, back to good old grammar book for the answers!

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I suppose it all depends on the content of the conversation or phrase involved. Then it probably all makes sense.

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If you search on “Gliel.”, you will find a whopping 110 sentences. I think the diversity in the translations corroborates my thinking. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Chi glieli ha dati?

I think depending on context this can be -

Who gave them to him?
Who gave them to her?
Who gave them to you? (formal Lei)
Who gave them to them?

Context is all, but yes it does seem odd to a native speaker of English.

On the other hand, I suspect that Italians find it odd that when we speak about a friend, the gender of that friend is not immediately apparent.

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This makes total sense - context is all!

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