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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]
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.
The Spanish language uses determiners in a similar way to English. The main differences are that Spanish determiners inflect for gender (masculine/feminine, with some instances of vestigial neuter) and always inflect for number as well. [1]
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.
[6] [7] Venus was a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty and fertility. Despite the terms femininity and masculinity being in common usage, there is little scientific agreement about what femininity and masculinity are. [3]: 5 Among scholars, the concept of femininity has varying meanings. [8]
[6] [7] A further complication is that the creation of distinctly different job titles for men and women means that in writing about hypothetical people of undetermined gender, both words must be mentioned each time, which can become quite cumbersome, or one of the titles must be accepted as genderless which is inherently divisive. In languages ...
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]
Spanish object pronouns may be both clitic and non-clitic; the clitic form is the unstressed form, and the non-clitic form, which is formed with the preposition a ("to") and the prepositional case, is the stressed form. Clitics cannot function independently and must attach to a host (either a verb [5] or preposition).