19
There's more than one reason for that.
The structure of the Italian keyboard
I believe that the major reason has to be researched in the Italian keyboard: indeed, the key for è and é is the same. If it is pressed without any other keys, it outputs "è", while if it's used in combination with "Maiusc", it outputs "é".
My guess is ...
12
Your assignation is not standard (even if there is not an official standard): for instance, for M most people would pick Milano, and to connect a letter and a city name one often uses come (“D come Domodossola”).
Anyway, there is an Italian Wikipedia article about the so-called “Alfabeto telefonico italiano”, which gives the following table (here simplified ...
10
No, in general, even when there are different meanings, words are written without accents. In these cases, context is the only way to desume the word meaning.
For a few words the accent is mandatory to give them a specific meaning: for instance, dà used as verb (verb dare, = to give), even when the meaning is clear from the context. Da could also be a ...
8
It is standard Italian, although some passage are in a "poetic" language (uncommon word order, some truncations or archaisms).
The only word that's leaving me a little bit puzzled is ar, which could be a truncation of aria but which I don't think I've ever heard (in poetry the more archaic aer would sound more natural). Listening carefully to the song, it ...
8
The list is wrong about pronunciation. The rule is much simpler: you never pronounce the H, it's only used to tell a hard C/G (call, gall) from a soft C/G (choke, joke).
The graphic usage of H in words that are not loanwords is limited to -che-, -chi-, -ghe-, -ghi-, interjections (ehi, ah etc. and short forms used as interjections like toh, beh - also ...
8
Historical note. Until about the '50s (I do not have a precise date) in Italian books some accents were written "the other way around", i.e. using the grave accents where one would use the acute one today and the other way around. "Perché" was one of these words.
For example, have a look at the following page of this novel from 1902, third paragraph:
[…] ...
8
This isn't a complete answer, but while Googling to try to find out more, I came across the following explanation for why some speakers might think there is a difference in pronunciation:
The orthographic distinction between 'z' and 'zz' induces some speakers to distinguish length in pronunciation (spazi 'spaces' spatsi vs. spazzi 'you sweep' spattsi) ...
7
The phonetic system of standard Italian has seven vowels: a (in IPA, /a/), closed e (/e/), open e (/ɛ/), i (/i/), closed o (/o/), open o (/ɔ/), u (/u/).
The accent is usually only written to denote the main stress on a word when it is on the last syllable, so you cannot normally graphically distinguish between botte meaning “barrel” (and pronounced /'bot:e/)...
7
The one with the apostrophe is correct, see the Accademia della Crusca site, even tough on the same page the spelling 'daccordo' is listed as a less common but still correct form.
6
Everything has been said already, however you ask when you should use ò vs. ó vs o (and, I guess, similarly for è vs. é etc.).
In the case of "o" it's relatively easy: the only case where an accent needs to be written is if it's on the last letter of a word (with exceptions for monosyllables and a few other cases which however we won't go into here)...
6
Non ci può essere una regola. Gli esempi di coppie minime sono tanti:
casa/cassa
fata/fatta
copia/coppia
cola/colla
sera/serra
e così via. Nessun correttore automatico che non abbia anche un controllo semantico può segnalare errori in questi casi.
Se pronunciamo vale (voce del verbo valere) e valle (quella che sta fra i monti), la a ...
6
It is not a matter of syllabification, rather the doubling of the consonant indicates a different pronunciation.
It is perhaps hard at first for non native speakers to hear the difference, but Italians make a distinction between simple and geminate consonants. Geminate consonants are pronounced longer and more forcefully than simple ones. They also tend to ...
6
You have to distinguish between gemination in spelling and pronunciation.
French has a lot of geminated consonants in spelling, but none in pronunciation (except maybe at word boundaries, when a word ends with the same consonant the next word begins with).
The French word suppression comes directly from Latin subpressio/suppressio, where the second ...
5
I don't know of any pair where the final acute or grave accent distinguishes the words and would bet there aren't any. There are only minimal pairs of words where the accent is not marked: pésca (fishing) and pèsca (peach) is the classical example, but both are simply written pesca.
The question why two forms of the graphic accents are used (acuto and grave)...
5
I am not sure why the DOP (which is the source the Crusca site quotes) included, even as a rare form, “daccordo”, but none among Treccani, Zingarelli and Devoto-Oli dictionaries admit it (nor, for what's worth, would I, as an Italian native).
5
At Grande dizionario della lingua italiana you can find the voice "crack" with this meaning:
Nel poker, nel bridge, ecc., giocatore molto abile, ritenuto imbattibile.
= Voce ingl., propr. ‘eccellente’.
So, as mentioned by @egreg in his comment, you should to spell it "crack". Notice that this dictionary says that it comes ...
4
-e is not a typically masculine ending at all. Just think of ape, arte, automobile, base, botte, capitale, carne, cassaforte, cenere, classe, comune, croce, estate, falce, fame, fede, filiale, fine, frase, gente, igiene, indole, lavastoviglie, legge, lepre, lince, luce, madre, mente, moglie, morale, nave, neve, noce, note, notte, pace, parete, patente, ...
4
Apart from the vague suggestions I gave in the comments, perhaps the nearest to an actual answer is here. The digital version of Zingarelli dictionary allows some quite refined searches. It is mostly a vocabulary of contemporary use, not a historical one, so one of the requisites is satisfied by default.
By searching the the present (2018) edition for ...
4
The origin is from ‘di accordo’; although the phrase is just a single adverb, it's customary to write it with an apostrophe. Other compound adverbs or conjunctions are normally written as single words, but, as ‘tutt'al più’–‘tuttalpiù’ or ‘per lo più’–‘perlopiù’ show, there is no general consensus about this.
Personally I'd never write ‘daccordo’.
4
Di: preposition, "of", "from" and others. Il libro di Marco.
Dì: substantive, a bit antiquated/literary but still used here and there, "day". La sera del dì di festa.
Di': imperative of "dire". Di' la verità.
Edit: perhaps also:
Ne: adverb, pronoun (does not have an english counterpart). Non ne sapevo nulla.
Né: conjunction, "neither/nor". Né l'uno né l'...
4
I don't know "trichotomous" or "quadrichotomous" words other than the ones mentioned in the question and by @DaG, but there are plenty "dicotomous" words, whose third form represents a common error:
Fa => musical note, third person of the present indicative of "fare" (to do) / fa' => imperative of fare, second person singular;
Sta => third person singular ...
4
Off the top of my head, hoping in further contributions:
e meaning “and”;
è meaning “(he/she/it) is”;
e' ancient (also used in modern Tuscan), truncated form for ei, that is, egli (“he”) or essi ("they"). As this word is a proclitic word, it is pronounced together with the following word which is the one that is stressed. Another archaic and modern Tuscan ...
4
The only occurrence I could find of a spelling similar to cafeé in an Italian text is caveè, in a report by 16th-century cardinal and ambassador Gianfrancesco Morosini, as quoted in Le relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato raccolte, annotate ed edite da Eugenio Alberi (1855). Speaking about Turks after his mission in Constantinople, he wrote in 1585:
...
4
According to the Enciclopedia Treccani the first instance of this decision was made by Salviati, in his Avvertimenti sopra la lingua del Decamerone
A fine Cinquecento, è fondamentale la figura di Lionardo Salviati. Nei suoi Avvertimenti sopra la lingua del Decamerone (1584) egli giustifica le scelte grafiche da lui operate come curatore di un’edizione ...
4
As @Charo mentioned, the word crack does come from English. This question on another SE website explores the question a little further. The origin of the word can be traced back to 1793 apparently.
In Italian, I would dare suggest that the usage has greatly increased in sports context because of the big presence of Spanish speaking players/coaches/managers. ...
3
It's called "troncamento" in Italian (and it's not limited to verbs, compare "dottor Rossi").
This may provide some guidance: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/troncamento_%28Enciclopedia_dell%27Italiano%29/
Note section 2,
Tra una forma verbale e la parola successiva il troncamento può verificarsi, purché le due parole siano strutturalmente vicine,...
3
From the Italian Orthography Wikipedia page (translated):
Grapheme 〈h〉
In Italian 〈h〉 is a so-called "silent" letter, i.e. without a phonological value (although in some cases it may indicate an aspirated sound /h/, similar to the Florentine gorgue), whose main functions are diacritical and/or distinctive.
Today's orthographically regulated uses ...
3
As far as I'm aware, the only pair of words spelled as such in Italian are:
bè1 vs Bé3
The list increases somewhat if you expand your criteria from words ending ...è vs ...é to words with terminal stress /ˈɛ/ vs /ˈe/ (seemingly all monosyllabic):
re vs re
v'è vs ve, 've, ve' (veh)
c'è vs ce
uè1 vs UE
me' vs me, me'
che vs che
deh vs de, de'
neh vs ne, ...
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