♪ ♪ ♪ Nel nome del Padre e del Figlio † e dello Spirito Santo. #twitterangelus #it
— Mark Dobson (@MarkTSoaPM) Gennaio 7, 2013
nel, del, dello
To see what's going on in this first line, we also need to look at how prepositions combine with articles. What I wrote on this last time is here.
The Angelus is longer than the Padre Nostro. It also contains more prepositions. Have a look:
a - to
da - from
in - in
di - of
su - on
per - for, by means of
con - with
fra - between, among, from
Those are only the basic meanings; the functions of prepositions tend to vary wildly according to circumstance, so it would be a fool's errand to attempt to cover all the possibilities here. One to watch out for in the Angelus, however, is per, which can mean "by means of", as in:
per opera dello Spirito
by [the] work of-the Spirit
per la sua passione e la sua croce
through (the) his passion and (the) his cross
Whereas su doesn't actually appear in the Angleus; I added it so that the table I'm about to give you is complete. Last time, for the Padre Nostro, there were less prepositions, and we didn't have all the articles, so the table of prepositions combining with articles didn't need to be so big. This time you can see the whole thing:
| masculine | feminine | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| singular | plural | singular | plural | |||||
| + il | + l' | + lo | + i | + gli | + la | + l' | + le | |
| a | al | all' | allo | ai | agli | alla | all' | alle |
| da | dal | dall' | dallo | dai | dagli | dalla | dall' | dalle |
| in | nel | nell' | nello | nei | negli | nella | nell' | nelle |
| di | del | dell' | dello | dei | degli | della | dell' | delle |
| su | sul | sull' | sullo | sui | sugli | sulla | sull' | sulle |
e
e means "and", of course, same as it did last time. And that's the first line covered already.
