Agua--why did it use the masculine definite article "el" ?
I just finished doing lesson 1.3. In the lesson it had the phrase "el agua", but from my understanding the teacher said the noun ends in a it's feminine. So why did it use the masculine definite article "el" ?
4 Answers
Often when feminine nouns begin with the letter, "a" for purposes of proper phonetics, the article is change to the masculine. L(a) agua would be confusing as it would sound like one word.. So they use the masculine article "el," although the word remains feminine. In other cases, many words derived from Greek use the same protocol, masculine for a word ending in a.
El planeta. El sistema. El mapa,etc.
In this case though, the noun is listed as masculine. Exceptions which you just have to learn. Good luck!
To avoid awkward sounds, other examples of femenine words that use el in sigular:
el águila - las águilas
el área - las áreas
el arma - las armas
el hacha - las hachas
Note that the first A in all of them is accented.
It's definitely "el agua".
I can't explain why that is, but there always seem to be exceptions to every rule when it comes to determining what gender a noun is. It's the same for both "el" and "la", for example; 'el día', 'el planeta' and 'el panda' are all masculine.
Welcome to the world of the atonic a like diagonx said it is to avoid repition of the a sound /
