Does Italian allow "—" for parenthetical use?

Question

In English you can use a number of different styles to add parenthetical remarks. For example:

Juventus, as you may know, has won the most Scudetti.
Some would say it's 29 (and technically they're right).
Others however claim it's 31 — although they're usually die-hard Juventus supporters.

Is the dash style of parenthetical remarks also allowed by Italian grammar? I know I've casually used it from time to time and no one seemed confused by it, but that doesn't make it right.

OT: those claiming it's 31 are doing to sports what revisionists are doing to history and creationists to science. — o0'., Nov 16 '13 at 12:57
That being said, I'd only use n-dash inside a sentence, and m-dash only at the beginning, for direct speech. — o0'., Nov 16 '13 at 12:59
@Lohoris In typography, mdash is for parenthetical use, ndash is for ranges. — Sklivvz, Nov 16 '13 at 18:08
@Sklivvz That's British typography. In Italy the en-dash is frequently used instead of the em-dash (with spaces at either end, usually). I suspect that the Wikipedia page you refer is more or less a translation from the English one. — egreg, Nov 16 '13 at 21:13
@Sklivvz Don't trust it.wikipedia; many entries are simply translations from English. — egreg, Nov 16 '13 at 21:16
surely you can convince me with a better reference then, and maybe fix the Wikipedia page :-) — Sklivvz, Nov 16 '13 at 21:18
@egreg by the way, I can't certainly be accused of being complacent towards Wikipedia as a Skeptics moderator... ;-) — Sklivvz, Nov 16 '13 at 21:43

DaG · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-16T09:07:28.007

Traditional Italian usage admits the n-dash in couples only. To rewrite one of your examples: «Juventus – as you may know – has won the most Scudetti». The single dash to introduce a clause at the end of a sentence is quite recently borrowed from English, but doesn't belong to usual Italian punctuation.

To quote from Bice Mortara Garavelli, Prontuario di punteggiatura, Laterza 2003:

Come marca iniziale di una parentetica inserita alla fine di una frase si può trovare una lineetta priva della lineetta terminale correlativa. Tradizionalmente, per un inserto che si trovi in tale posizione, si preferiscono alle lineette le parentesi (una in apertura e una in chiusura seguita dal punto finale), oppure la virgola iniziale [...].

you speak of m-dash (—) but use the n-dash (–) in your example. Actually, AFAIK your example is correct, and you should replace m-dash with n-dash in your first sentence. BTW, in the Apple keyboard layout the n-dash is "command dash", while the m-dash is "command shift dash." — Walter Tross, Nov 15 '15 at 23:25

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 15 '14 at 08:25

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I used to attend a school for translators, and all the translators who gave us lessons used to tell us that the m-dash is actually allowed by Italian grammar but no more in use, so we SHOULD NOT use it while translating from English or German; instead, we could turn it into brackets, commas or other punctuation, as the case requires.

answered Mar 15 '14 at 08:25

Mad Hatter

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I assure you that I am translating a book from English to Italian and we are leaving all parenthetical m-dashes, while converting the single ones to comma or colons. – mau Mar 15 '14 at 16:48

Does Italian allow "—" for parenthetical use?

2 Answers2