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Similarly, the Spanish words for "brother" and "sister" are hermano and hermana, whereas in Italian, they are fratello and sorella. Another unique aspect of Spanish is that personal pronouns have distinct feminine forms for the first and second person plural. For example, the Spanish pronouns nosotras and vosotras specifically refer to groups ...
Activists against sexism in language are also concerned about words whose feminine form has a different (usually less prestigious) meaning: An ambiguous case is "secretary": a secretaria is an attendant for her boss or a typist, usually female, while a secretario is a high-rank position—as in secretario general del partido comunista, "secretary general of the communist party"—usually held ...
Job titles have a masculine and a feminine version in Russian, though in most cases the feminine version is only used in colloquial speech. The masculine form is typically treated as "unmarked", i.e. it does not necessarily imply that the person is male, while the feminine form is "marked" and can only be used when referring to a woman. In some ...
For example, a diminutive form of el coche 'car' is el cochecito 'baby carriage' while the diminutive form of el carro 'car' formed from the same suffix is el carrito 'shopping cart'. Some Spanish nouns can take a large number of affective suffixes, creating words with subtle differences in meaning or connotation.
Spanish is capable of expressing such concepts without a special cleft structure thanks to its flexible word order. For example, if we translate a cleft sentence such as "It was Juan who lost the keys", we get Fue Juan el que perdió las llaves. Whereas the English sentence uses a special structure, the Spanish one does not.
Man is commonly used to mean 'one' and is frequently used in general statements. It is similar to English indefinite "you" or "one." Feminine job titles are usually created by adding -in to the grammatically masculine word in question. Informatiker (singular or plural). The feminine form is Informatikerin (singular) and Informatikerinnen (plural).
Its a-is unstressed, but it usually takes el even when feminine. In addition, azúcar can be of both genders in Spanish (other words with double gender are sal (salt), mar (sea) and sartén (frying pan)): el azúcar refinada (el azúcar refinado and la azúcar refinada are also acceptable) Feminine el does not have the same origin as the ...
This division into two groups is a generalization, however. There are many examples, such as the adjective español itself, of adjectives whose lemmas do not end in -o but nevertheless take -a in the feminine singular as well as -as in the feminine plural and thus have four forms: in the case of español, española, españoles, españolas.