Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
[5] [6] For this class of nouns, the masculine and feminine often take different forms. By convention, the masculine form is treated as the lemma (that is, the form listed in dictionaries) and the feminine form as the marked form. [7] For nouns of this class with the masculine form ending in -o, the feminine form typically replaces the -o with -a.
Twenty20. This pretty Spanish name has vintage charm and a meaning of “light.’ 2. Martina. The feminine form of Martin, Martina has a cute and peppy sound that belies its fierce meaning of ...
The Spanish conjunctions y ('and') and o ('or') alter their form in both spoken and written language to e and u respectively when followed by an identical vowel sound. Thus, padre e hijo ('father and son'), Fernando e Isabel ('Ferdinand and Isabella'), sujeto u objeto ('subject or object'), vertical u horizontal ('vertical or horizontal').
Feminine forms of German nouns are usually created by adding -in to the root, which corresponds to the masculine form. For example, the root for secretary is the masculine form Sekretär . Adding the feminine suffix yields Sekretärin ("woman secretary"; plural: Sekretärinnen : "women secretaries").
Antonia is a Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese name used in many parts of the world. [1] Antónia is a Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Polish feminine form of Anton, Antal and António used in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, Switzerland, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as parts of Romania. [2]
Furthermore, some see evidence of the intentional preference of the masculine over the feminine. It has been argued that 17th-century grammaticians who wanted to assert male dominance worked to suppress the feminine forms of certain professions, leading to the modern-day rule that prefers the masculine over the feminine in the French language. [4]