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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]
When nouns deviate from the rules for gender, there is usually an etymological explanation: problema ("problem") is masculine in Spanish because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender, whereas foto ("photo") and radio ("broadcast signal") are feminine because they are clippings of fotografía and radiodifusión respectively, both ...
In -er verbs (and some -ir verbs, like disminuir) whose stem ends with a vowel, the i of the -iendo ending is replaced by y: e.g. leer, traer, creer → leyendo, trayendo, creyendo. In -ir verbs whose stem ends with e —such as reír and sonreír —the stem vowel e is raised to i (as is typical of -ir verbs), and this i merges with the i of ...
If the masculine version ends with a consonant, the feminine is typically formed by adding an -a to it as well: el doctor, la doctora. However, not all nouns ending in -o are masculine, and not all nouns ending in -a are feminine: Singular nouns ending in -o or -a are epicene (invariable) in some cases: testigo (witness, any gender).
Singular masculine and neuter nouns of the strong declension in the genitive case are marked with -(e)s. Generally, one-syllable nouns favour the -es ending, and it is obligatory with nouns ending with a sibilant such as s or z. Otherwise, a simple -s ending is usual. Feminine and plural nouns remain uninflected:
Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns. For example, in Spanish, the masculine gender generally precedes the feminine, and the default form of address for a group of students is the masculine plural los ...
A masculine ending and feminine ending or weak ending are terms used in prosody, the study of verse form. In general, "masculine ending" refers to a line ending in a stressed syllable; "feminine ending" is its opposite, describing a line ending in a stressless syllable. The terms originate from a grammatical pattern of the French language.