doubt abont definite articles
Hola,
why in agua(water) there is "El"( I saw in one of these videos). But it ends in 'a' so it should have feminine 'the' i.e "la". Gracias.
4 Answers
There are many words that end in “a” that are masculine- including the majority (but not all) that end in ma, pa, ta. So don't make that a rule.
El mapa, los mapas temáticos .
Agua is feminine however.
Las aguas frías.
It is El agua in this case because words that have a stressed “a” sound at the start take “el” and “un” as articles in the singular. This does not affect anything else- like adjectives.
El agua fría (not frío)
Other examples:
El hacha, las hachas
El águila, las águilas
El alma, las almas
But not:
La almohada- because the stress does not fall on the "a".
This is not dissimilar to the fact that "a" changes to "an" in English in front of a vowel sound:
a university, an umbrella, a history, an herb.
Welcome to the forum. I am sure this question must have been answered before. In this case it is because 'la' agua is difficult to say. When you are talking about something in the singular with a stressed a or ha you use el. However,it is still a femenine word so if you add an adjective eg agua pura the adjective needs an a.
If you talk about more than one then you use 'las'. An example of 'ha ' is el hambre [hunger] It is similar to the way in English we use 'an' when it would be difficult to say 'a' but English is trickier - we say an NGO because we say the 'n' EN so you cannot think if there is no vowel lit is 'a'.
On a similar point there are some feminine words ending in 'o' but they are usually abbreviations eg la moto and some masculine nouns ending in a but they are usually occupations or words of Greek origin.
Happy learning
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