Q:
I read: “Ho dato qualcosa allo zio”, “Ho dato qualcosa alla mamma”, “Ho dato qualcosa a Paolo”. Why “allo zio” and “alla mamma” instead of “a zio” and “a mamma”?
Where and when do I use this allo or alla?

A:
In case of parents and some relatives in italian (e.g., mamma, papà, zio, nonno/a) you can use both the simple and compound preposition: “a” and “a”+<article>, so mamma, nonna, zia (female) both “a” and “alla”, for male parents both “a” and “allo/al”.
So this works in these cases of parents and relatives:
“dai a/alla mamma/zia/nonna il regalo”
“dai a/al papà(/babbo)/nonno il regalo”
“dai a/allo zio il regalo” (”a zio” without his name is a bit strange in formal italian, but quite common specially when addressing to kids)

By the way this works only with such family roles, for instance you can’t say:
“dai a fratello” or “dai a sorella”.
You can say “dai al fratello” or “dai alla sorella” but you must indicate “di chi?”, “whom brother/sister?” e.g. “dai al fratello di Gino il regalo”.
Same for “nipote” and other relationships (genero, cognato, etc..)

So a general rule could be:
always use only the simple preposition for personal names
“ricetta a Paolo”
and compound preposition for other nouns:
“ricetta al dottore”, “ricetta alla dottoressa”
papà, mamma, etc.. are simply an exception, just as if they were personal names and in fact they replace the first name of the parent.

Since this site and its journal is bilingual, or at least most of the posts are often in both Italian and English, I added this new category to post about English-Italian oddities, idioms, false friends and everything else.

Even though I love English language and I’m studying it since a long time, unfortunately it is still quite ugly, that’s why I decided to translate almost each post of this bilingual journal, to force me in practicing a bit more.
The main source of my improving intent is the WordReference English-Italian Forum: natives of both language open topics to ask about tricky or colloquial sentences hard to translate using a dictionary. I rarely open threads but even discussing a topic reveals to be a powerful way to improve the language knowledge.

In my Language category I’ll try to post in both languages:
in the italian version I’ll show how an english sentence would sound in italian and the same vice-versa in the english one. So obviously in this case it wouldn’t be a literal translation as I’m used to do in usual posts.

Of course comments are definitely welcome!

Enjoy