¿El mar o la mar? The Grammatical Genders
n Spanish, nouns are basically divided into two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. The gender of the noun determines, for example, which articles are used with it and also affects the form of adjectives. Additionally, there are cases of neuter nouns, as we will see later, such as in the case of adjectival nouns.
Broadly speaking, nouns ending in -o are masculine, and those ending in -a are feminine, but there are exceptions in both cases:
- El libro (the book), el perro (the dog), el zapato (the shoe) (masculine) but la mano (the hand), la foto (the photo) (short for fotografía), la moto (the motorcycle) (short for motocicleta). There are few feminine nouns ending in -o, and most of them are abbreviations of other feminine nouns.
- La mesa (the table), la casa (the house), la corbata (the tie) (feminine), but el mapa (the map), el día (the day), el problema (the problem). There are more masculine nouns ending in -a than feminine nouns ending in -o, so the recommendation—especially since there are nouns ending in other letters—is to learn nouns along with their respective articles.
When it comes to nouns that refer to inanimate objects, it is common for each noun to have only one grammatical gender. For example, la pared (the wall), el reloj (the clock), la puerta (the door), el auto (the car), la casa (the house), el vaso (the glass), and la chimenea (the chimney) present no ambiguity regarding their grammatical gender. Once again, while the rule of ending in -o or -a can help determine a noun’s gender, there are exceptions, and many nouns do not end in either of these two letters.
In the case of animals, we can distinguish two groups. For many animals, there is one word to refer to the male and another to refer to the female: el toro/la vaca (bull/cow), el gato/la gata (cat), el caballo/la yegua (horse/mare), el perro/la perra (dog), el gallo/la gallina (rooster/hen). For most animals, however, there is only one noun used to refer to both males and females: el águila (eagle), la zarigüeya (opossum), el ratón (mouse), or la rata (rat) can refer to either males or females. These are known as epicene nouns, meaning the same word with the same grammatical gender can refer to individuals of different biological sexes.
When referring to people, there are even more exceptions. Some nouns have both a masculine and a feminine form distinguished by their endings, such as hermano/hermana (brother/sister) or niño/niña (child, kid), while others have completely different names, such as padre/madre (father/mother) or yerno/nuera (son-in-law, daughter-in-law). There are also nouns known as common gender nouns, which differ from epicene nouns because the same word can take either grammatical gender. Examples include el/la artista, el/la pianista, el/la profesional (artist, pianist, professional). Additionally, there are epicene nouns that refer to people: el personaje (character) and el vástago (offspring), for instance, can refer to men or women, while la persona (person) or la víctima (victim) always remain feminine regardless of the individual’s sex.
Ambiguous nouns in terms of gender: There are nouns for which both grammatical genders are accepted without changing the meaning of the word. Their use generally depends on cultural norms or linguistic varieties. Examples include el/la mar (sea), el/la sartén (frying pan), el/la vodka (yes, vodka :)).
There are also words that exist in both grammatical genders, but whose meaning changes depending on the gender: el cometa (comet) / la cometa (kite), el cólera (disease) / la cólera (anger), el editorial (journalistic article) / la editorial (publishing house), el cura (priest) / la cura (cure), el corte (cut) / la corte (court).
Finally, some expressions can be grammatically neutral in Spanish. In ¿Qué es eso? (What’s that?) we are asking, for example, what is something we are seeing, which could be a masculine or feminine noun. In “Lo bueno del verano es que se puede ir a la playa” (the good thing od the summer is that you can go to the beach), we refer to an advantage of summer, but without reference to grammatical genders. And in “Aquello fue hermoso” (that was beautiful), we could be referring to a trip (el viaje), which is masculine, or a dinner (la cena), which is feminine. But we will explore this in another article.
Since this is a blog about Spanish as a foreign language, it’s worth making the following clarification: if the language(s) you speak have grammatical genders that affect all nouns, don’t expect them to match in Spanish. Nor should you expect them to follow any logical pattern. Grammatical gender is, after all, purely grammatical and a consequence of the evolution of languages. For example, the word chica or muchacha in German is Mädchen, das Mädchen, which is grammatically neuter, even though it refers to a female person. This occurs because the word derives from Magd, a word from medieval German to which the diminutive suffix –chen was later added. All words with this suffix in German are grammatically neuter, regardless of what they refer to. And one more example: there are nouns in Spanish that are synonyms but have different grammatical genders. La palta/el aguacate (avocado), la cometa/el barrilete (kite), la jerga/el argot (jargon), la torta/el pastel (cake).
I hope this article has been helpful to you. If you have any questions, feel free to write to me. Thank you for reading!
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