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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]
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 ...
Many grammars of Spanish suggest that nouns ending in -a are feminine, [14] [15] but there is no requirement that Spanish nouns ending in -a be feminine. [10] Thus, grammars that pose such a requirement also typically include a long list of exceptions, such as el alerta 'alert', el bocata 'sandwich', el caza 'fighter plane', and many others.
The abbreviation is not always a short form of the word used in the clue. For example: "Knight" for N (the symbol used in chess notation) Taking this one stage further, the clue word can hint at the word or words to be abbreviated rather than giving the word itself. For example: "About" for C or CA (for "circa"), or RE.
To make words or phrases gender-inclusive, French-speakers use two methods. Orthographic solutions strive to include both the masculine and feminine endings in the word. Examples include hyphens (étudiant-e-s), middle dots (étudiant·e·s), [38] parentheses (étudiant(e)s), or capital letters (étudiantEs). The parentheses method is now often ...
The at symbol, due to its shape resembling a combination of the letters "a" and "o" and its wide availability on keyboards, became one of the first mechanisms of gender neutrality in language. However, its usage is limited to writing. Along with the at symbol, the letter "x" has also been used to replace the gendered "-a" or "-o ". [7]
In linguistics, feminization refers to the process of re-classifying nouns and adjectives which as such refer to male beings, including occupational terms, as feminine. This is done most of the time by adding inflectional suffixes denoting a female (such as the standard suffix -ess in English, or its equivalent -a in Spanish ).
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T-V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis.