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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]
la: Standard form of the feminine singular definite article, used before consonants and before i when pronounced as semivowel /j/, e.g. la iarda. l' As with l', used before any word that begins with a vowel, not including i when pronounced as the semivowel /j/. Plural le: Standard form of the feminine plural definite article, never elided.
For job titles ending in epicene suffixes such as -iste (le/la dentiste) or -logue (le/la psychologue), the only change is in the article (le/la) and any associated adjectives. Abbreviated professions only change the article as well (le/la prof). In some cases, words already had a feminine form which was rarely used, and a new one was created.
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]
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 ...
Some distinctive features of Catalan among Romance languages include the general lack of masculine markers (like Italian -o), a trait shared with French and Occitan; and the fact that the remote preterite tense of verbs is usually formed with a periphrasis consisting of the verb "to go" plus infinitive.
The ending of the definite article can be modified to lo (masculine), la (feminine), lu (neuter), lis (plural), los (masculine plural), e las (feminine plural). [6] Of these, the forms lu and lis are most common: lu in the same sense as Spanish lo and English that which, as in Ne li aprension de un lingue es lu essential, ma su usation (that ...
For instance, the feminine form of el soldado 'the (male) soldier' is la soldado 'the (female) soldier', with only the gender of the article (el/la) distinguishing them in this case. For nouns of this class with the masculine form ending in -or, -ón, -ín, -és, and -án, the feminine form adds an -a.