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In Spanish, grammatical gender is a linguistic feature that affects different types of words and how they agree with each other. It applies to nouns, adjectives, determiners, and pronouns. Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence.
The Spanish and Portuguese termination -o usually denotes the masculine, and is normally changed to feminine by dropping the -o and adding -a. The plural forms are usually -os and -as respectively. Adjectives ending in -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. "the English", "the Cornish").
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word original can mean "authentic, traditional", or "novel, never done before". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1] [2] enantionymy (enantio-means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
Some Spanish-speaking people advocate for the use of the pronouns elle (singular) and elles (plural). [14] Spanish often uses -a and -o for gender agreement in adjectives corresponding with feminine and masculine nouns, respectively; in order to agree with a gender neutral or non-binary noun, it is suggested to use the suffix -e.
In such cases, a more dynamic translation may be used or a neologism may be created in the target language to represent the concept (sometimes by borrowing a word from the source language). The more the source language differs from the target language, the more difficult it may be to understand a literal translation without modifying or ...
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 loanwords enter Spanish in their plural forms but are reanalyzed as singular nouns (e.g., the Italian plurals el confeti 'confetti', el espagueti 'spaghetti', and el ravioli 'ravioli'). These words then follow the typical morphological rules of Spanish, essentially double marking the plural (e.g., los confetis, los espaguetis, and los ...
The cognates in the table below share meanings in English and Spanish, but have different pronunciation. Some words entered Middle English and Early Modern Spanish indirectly and at different times. For example, a Latinate word might enter English by way of Old French, but enter Spanish directly from Latin. Such differences can introduce ...