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In the case of languages which have masculine and feminine genders, the relation between biological sex and grammatical gender tends to be less exact in the case of animals than in the case of people. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex.
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 ...
un Standard masculine singular indefinite article, used before vowels and simple consonants. Used instead of un before "impure s", self-geminating consonants, and complex consonant clusters, following the same rules as lo vs. il above, for example: uno studente .
Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender. We may call a noun masculine, feminine or neuter depending on the pronouns which it selects in the singular. Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it. Count nouns divide into masculine and feminine.
Thus, even if the sex/gender distinction holds, the dichotomies of female/male and masculine/feminine are not themselves exhaustive. [131] Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body famously addresses the birth of intersex children. In their case, the standard model (sex/gender distinction) is seen as incorrect with regard to its notion that there ...
Many nouns ending in -e preceded by double consonants are also masculine (e.g. un cadre, un arbre, un signe, un meuble). Nonetheless, a noun that seems masculine judging by its ending might actually be feminine e.g., la peau 'the skin', une dent 'a tooth' or vice versa e.g., le coude 'the elbow', un squelette 'a skeleton' are masculine.
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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).