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Spanish, like most other Romance languages, is generally regarded to have two genders, but its ancestor, Latin, had three. The transition from three genders to two is mostly complete; however, vestiges of a neuter gender can still be seen. This was noted by Andrés Bello in his work on the grammar of Latin American Spanish. [7]
For example, a Latinate word might enter English by way of Old French, but enter Spanish directly from Latin. Such differences can introduce changes in spelling and meaning. Although most of the cognates have at least one meaning shared by English and Spanish, they can have other meanings that are not shared.
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 ...
Many dictionaries do not point out such differences. Canadian and Australian usage is mixed, although Commonwealth writers generally hyphenate compounds of the form noun plus phrase (such as editor-in-chief). [12] Commander-in-chief prevails in all forms of English. Compound verbs in British English are hyphenated more often than in American ...
The naming customs of Hispanic America are similar to the Spanish naming customs practiced in Spain, with some modifications to the surname rules.Many Hispanophones in the countries of Spanish-speaking America have two given names, plus like in Spain, a paternal surname (primer apellido or apellido paterno) and a maternal surname (segundo apellido or apellido materno).
This practice conflicts with the use of the letter "Ø" in the Danish and Norwegian languages. Forms that avoid this confusion include: a dot placed in the centre of zero; the use of a tick, that is, a slash that does not cross the entire bowl of the figure, but lies completely in the upper right; a form found in Germany with a vertical slash
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Spanish generally uses adjectives in a similar way to English and most other Indo-European languages. However, there are three key differences between English and Spanish adjectives. In Spanish, adjectives usually go after the noun they modify. The exception is when the writer/speaker is being slightly emphatic, or even poetic, about a ...