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In Spanish, nouns not belonging to the class described above form another class of noun. [1] The gender of nouns in this other class are arbitrarily assigned. However, some general patterns help to predict the gender of nouns. [11] Notably, the endings of nouns give clues to their genders. For instance, nouns ending in -o are usually masculine.
Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence. Generally, nouns referring to males or male animals are masculine, while those referring to females are feminine. [1] [2] In terms of importance, the masculine gender is the default or unmarked, while the feminine gender is marked or distinct. [2]
The Spanish word origen ("origin") is masculine, but its close relatives origem (from Portuguese), orixe (from Asturian) and origem/ orixe from Galician are feminine. The French word équipe ("team") is feminine, while the Spanish word equipo is masculine. The Spanish form contrasts with the Portuguese equipa / equipe, both of which are feminine.
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense , aspect , mood , person , and number (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).
Some nouns ending in -a refer only to men: cura ("priest") ends in -a but is grammatically masculine, for a profession held in Roman Catholic tradition only by men. Invariable words in Spanish are often derived from the Latin participles ending in -ans and -ens ( -antem and -entem in the accusative case): estudiante .
A hendiadys is a phrase that contains two complementary words, and a gender-neutral hendiadys will include a feminine word and a masculine word, e.g. toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens. Within France, this gender-inclusive language has been met with some harsh resistance from the Académie Française and French conservatives.
Diminutives are very productive endings, [3] they can change the function of a word and are formed by adding one of the suffixes-je, -pje, -kje, -tje, -etje to the word in question, depending on the latter's phonology:
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. [1] Some languages, such as Slavic, with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category.