genders of nouns
quick question.
nouns end in "o","e" and constant are masculine, right?
I just run into "la carne", is it an exception'
13 Answers
On the other hand, the thing that's kept Spanish spelling reasonably in line with pronunciation has been frequent reform of the spelling system, combined with the educational "plan of action" to encourage people to adopt it (as opposed to, say, France's attempted 1990 spelling reform which was a complete flop). If Spanish genuinely experiences an influx of loanwords in the way that English did, it's likely that the language's phonology will adapt (and/or patterons of 'how to pronounce the loanwords' become more established) so that the "loanwords" generally stop being perceived as loanwords, and their pronunciation becomes as well-established to native speakers as any other Spanish word. Then it's just a question of another spelling reform...
lazarus1907 said:
Italicising is a temporary solution at best, because the invasion of neologisms is virtually unstoppable. Our descendants will eventually have the same problems spelling and readings that you have in English, but I bet we'll still keep our useless genders and irregular verbs.
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Italicising is a temporary solution at best, because the invasion of neologisms is virtually unstoppable. Our descendants will eventually have the same problems spelling and readings that you have in English, but I bet we'll still keep our useless genders and irregular verbs.
Ah, I see what you're getting at. I guess whether you italicise such words depends on whether you judge the word to be genuinely an "unusual/difficult" word for your audience. Many of the (Spanish) programming books that I work with daily could easily have an English loanword on every other line; it might get a bit irritating to read them if all these words were italicised. But yes, it is a slight difficulty.
lazarus1907 said:
Neil Coffey said:
As for which one is more "logical", I wouldn't really have an opinion!
The logical way to pronounce "nurse" in Spanish is to make it sound "nurse", and not "nurs" or /n'rs/. If you wanted it to sound like "nurs", then write it "nurs", and if you want it to sound like /n'rs/, then write it in italics to warn the reader that the pronunciation could be random, and you need to look it up, like in English. Spanish used to be a language that took a minutes for anyone to learn how to read, and nowaways people seem to be very eager to add words from a language where you can never know how to read a word. I call the first approach "logical", because the way words are read follow a logic.
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Neil Coffey said:
As for which one is more "logical", I wouldn't really have an opinion!
The logical way to pronounce "nurse" in Spanish is to make it sound "nurse", and not "nurs" or /n'rs/. If you wanted it to sound like "nurs", then write it "nurs", and if you want it to sound like /n'rs/, then write it in italics to warn the reader that the pronunciation could be random, and you need to look it up, like in English. Spanish used to be a language that took a minutes for anyone to learn how to read, and nowaways people seem to be very eager to add words from a language where you can never know how to read a word. I call the first approach "logical", because the way words are read follow a logic.
There are also nouns that have both a masculine and feminine version which have a slightly different meaning - like el final and la final.
I've generally heard it [nurs] (i.e. the final -e "isn't pronounced"), although out of curiosity I just checked Collins Universal (8th ed) and they suggest [nurse]. As for which one is more "logical", I wouldn't really have an opinion!
lazarus1907 said:
Is this "nurse" pronounced as a normal Spanish word, or as an English one against all logic?
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Is this "nurse" pronounced as a normal Spanish word, or as an English one against all logic'
"nurse" is a loanword, usually used to mean for "nanny". In a sense, it doesn't really count if you go by phonology. I was going by orthography, largely for simplicity of running off the list, and also because beginners tend to go off the spelling anyway.
Thanks for your statistic-- it's interesting to get another guage.
lazarus1907 said:
Neil Coffey said:
ave, base, calle, carne, Chipre, clase, clave, corte (meaning 'court'), fase, fe, fiebre, frase, frente, fuente, gente, gripe, hache, hambre, leche, lente, liebre, llave, madre, mente, muerte, nave, nieve, noche, nube, nurse, parte, peste, sangre, sede, suerte, tarde, tele, torre. Plus of course "serie" as mentioned above.
What on Earth does nurse mean in Spanish?
Statistically, considering the entire dictionary, from all the words ending in -e, 75% are masculine, 16.5% can be used for both genders, and 8.5% are feminine.
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Neil Coffey said:
ave, base, calle, carne, Chipre, clase, clave, corte (meaning 'court'), fase, fe, fiebre, frase, frente, fuente, gente, gripe, hache, hambre, leche, lente, liebre, llave, madre, mente, muerte, nave, nieve, noche, nube, nurse, parte, peste, sangre, sede, suerte, tarde, tele, torre. Plus of course "serie" as mentioned above.
What on Earth does nurse mean in Spanish?
Statistically, considering the entire dictionary, from all the words ending in -e, 75% are masculine, 16.5% can be used for both genders, and 8.5% are feminine.
A few more common feminine words in -e:
bote, catástrofe, consonante, corriente, costumbre, cumbre, elipse, especie, faringe, hélice, hemorroide, incertidumbre, laringe, legumbre, masacre, pirámide, pose, serie, serpiente, superficie, tangente and variable.
There's no pattern as such that "words ending in -e are masculine". The situation is something like this:
- there are one or two derivational suffixes that end in -e which tend to dictate the gender of the word in question-- hence words ending in -ie will on the whole be feminine, words ending in -aje, -nte will on the whole tend to be masculine;
- words ending in -nte that refer to people will tend to follow the gender of the person (as do 'padre' and 'madre', of course)
- compound words/abbreviations will follow the gender of the main noun, or possibly of a noun that is "implied" ('corriente' is feminine, so so is 'contracorriente'; 'tele' is feminine from 'televisión')
- ignoring words denoting people, it turns out statistically that the vast majority of "long" words (say, more than 6 or 7 letters or more than 2 syllables) ending in -e are masculine (largely a consequence of tending to have one of the abovementioned endings), while about 1/3 to 1/4 of "short" words ending in -e are feminine[1].
Some common feminine short words ending in -e:
ave, base, calle, carne, Chipre, clase, clave, corte (meaning 'court'), fase, fe, fiebre, frase, frente, fuente, gente, gripe, hache, hambre, leche, lente, liebre, llave, madre, mente, muerte, nave, nieve, noche, nube, nurse, parte, peste, sangre, sede, suerte, tarde, tele, torre. Plus of course "serie" as mentioned above.
If you know another Romance language, especially French, then it might help you to know that in general, gender is fairly stable between French and Spanish (i.e. it turns out genders haven't changed much since their original Latin genders, with a few obvious exceptions like the French abstract nouns ending in -eur that became feminine, hence Sp. 'valor' (masc) vs Fr. 'valeur' (fem) etc). So if you're not sure of a Spanish gender, but you know the corresponding French word and it looks practically the same as the Spanish word, there's a good chance the French and Spanish genders will be the same.
[1] depending on what your criteria are for "short" vs "long" and what percentile of common words you include in your statistics
Words ending in -o are masculine except for "mano", a tiny handful of foreign words: "nao", "polio", "demo", "felatio", "macro" and "virago", and shortened words, like "loto" (la lotería), "moto" (la motocicleta), "radio" (la radiodifusión). In practice, 99.9% of the words in -o.
Words endind in -a are generally feminine, but unfortunately, there are a significant number of words (most of them from Greek) ending in -a, but still masculine. Some examples are aroma, axioma, buda, carisma, clima, día, diagrama, dilema, drama, fantasma, idioma, mañana (can also be feminine), panda, planeta, prisma, sistema and tema. Notice that many of these words end in -ma (there are over 500 words ending in -ma).
not always..like: el mapa, el tema, el dia are masculine.
and La mano is not masculine.
im not sure if there is any rule applyed here.
