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Another sign that Spanish once had a grammatical neuter exists in words that derive from neuter plurals. In Latin, a neuter plural ended in -a, and so these words today in Spanish are interpreted as feminine singulars and take singular verb forms; however, they do express some notion of a plural. [citation needed]
The French word mer is feminine, but the Spanish cognate mar is generally masculine (except in some poetic contexts and among sea workers [39]), whereas the Catalan cognate mar can be masculine or feminine, depending on the dialect. All these words mean "sea" and are descended from the Latin mare, which was neuter.
Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language.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.
This may be compared to usage of the word man for humans in general (although that was the original sense of the word "man" in the Germanic languages, much as the Latin word for "human in general", homo, came to mean "male human"—which was vir, in Latin—in most of the Romance languages). (19) a. All men are created equal. b.
In Spanish, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am"). The pronoun yo (I) in the explicit form yo soy is used only for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts.
For example, Spanish allows for all six possible word orders, compared to French’s three. Additionally, unlike other Romance languages, specifically Spanish and Italian, French does not have free inversion, which is often explained by French not being a pro-drop language (while Spanish and Italian are). [6]
French has a T-V distinction in the second person singular. That is, it uses two different sets of pronouns: tu and vous and their various forms. The usage of tu and vous depends on the kind of relationship (formal or informal) that exists between the speaker and the person with whom they are speaking and the age differences between these subjects. [1]
The article additionally solves the problem posed by the alternate verbal forms of Chilean voseo like the future indicative (e.g. bailaríh or bailarái 'you will dance'), the present indicative forms of haber (habíh and hai 'you have'), and the present indicative of ser (soi, eríh and eréi 'you are'), without resorting to any ad hoc rules ...