Talk:Spanish nouns

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Hi. I'm the main contributor to this article. If anyone has any questions regarding Spanish grammar, I'd be happy to answer them, and incorporate the answer into the article. Fire away! — Chameleon 17:16, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Neuter

I've added a bit about the rare but still existing neuter gender in Spanish, as can be seen in words like esto, the neuter form of este, which comes from Latin istud, the neuter form of iste. I am short on citations because I'm basing this on my own personal studies and experiences on Spanish and Latin, however I believe it to be accurate and looked in the RAE dictionary which seems to back me up. What do you guys think? ¿Cómo os parece? Andyluciano 20:38, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

There's a difference between neuter and neutral. IMO esto is not a neuter version of éste and ésta (note the diacritic accents), but a "neutral" (general, non-contrastive) pronoun that means "this thing". For people the only "neuter" form is esta persona. Éste and ésta are different because they are contrastive or at least imply a previous reference. This in no way contradicts the contributions you've been making. What does the RAE say about this exactly? --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 14:45, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

It's been a long time but I found an interesting source on the existence of a neutral gender in Spanish. Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos by Andrés Bello. Throughout that, he notes that words like lo, ello, and eso have a few pecularities and gives example sentences to illustrate that. The source is a bit dated, but I find it an interesting read. – Andyluciano 17:09, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I looked again at my work here and removed what I now consider to be original research, and also added some information from the source above. – Andyluciano 17:40, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Classification of nouns.

There are more classification of nouns. Trying to remember from morphological analysis in school these come to mind:

• Abstract and concrete.
• Individual and collective. With some nuances here I forgot about.
• Common or proper. This is like in English, I imagine.
• Simple or compound, depending on the number of lexemes.
• Primitive or derivative, depending on whether it carries meaning-bearing affixes.

Not sure if the article needs that kind of detail though. Eulen 19:15, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Does an article on Spanish nouns really need a section on "vestiges of a neuter gender" that is all about pronouns? Eulen (5 March 2006) said it all: "Not sure if the article needs that kind of detail." Amen! Kotabatubara (talk) 12:41, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Examples of Masculine and Feminine words

Hello there. While I may not be fluent in Spanish to any extent, I do have a slight concern about the words used as examples of showing masculine and feminine words. The words "pan" and "leche" are both irregular nouns in the sense that they do not follow the regular way of determining the gender of a word. I personally would think that you should at least provide more common examples of words which would repersent the masculine and feminine forms, such as words that greater repersent the majority of nouns which end with "O", "A", and "IÓN". I would suggest one ending in "A" for feminine and "O" for masculine. ¿Cúal son sus opiniones?

P.S.: Please excuse any spelling or grammer errors, I cannot say I am in the best of sorts at the time. Jerichi 4:34, 17 November, 2006 (UTC)

You have a point there, perhaps the first example should be a model noun ending in a and o. I don't know what the rest thinkgs... Mariano(t/c) 10:07, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

In the section "Vestiges of a neutral gender": From what I remember from my school days, most Latin-origin nouns come from the accusative case form of the Latin word, not from the nominative case. Hence, in most 2nd declension words, you drop the final 'm', not the final 's', to build the romance language word, before applying any other changes (u > o, etc). It's usual in all romance (=latin origin) languages, not just in Spanish. You can check it in any etymological dictionary. The word 'lo' is never used as a masculine article. Compare: "¿Qué vino quieres?" "El mismo que ayer." ("El mismo vino que ayer", you can't use 'lo' in this sentence, at least not with the same meaning) "¿Qué has comido hoy?" "Lo mismo que ayer." (The same [food] as yesterday, here you must use 'lo'. If you use another article 'el' o 'la' you need to explicitly say the noun: "La misma comida que ayer", "El mismo pollo que ayer"). I dare not make the corrections myself because I'm not familiar with English technical vocabulary in Linguistics. I apologise in advance for any grammatical mistakes I may have made.

I am a native speaker of Spanish and as far as I am concerned, agua is masculine and never feminine whenever I've heard it. just thought I'd mention that since I decided not to correct it immediately in case I was wrong. After all, I'm no professor either! Jorge Padrón 01:37, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Jorge, perhaps the fact that the article used with agua is el instead of la confuses you. After all, you never say El agua está frio, but El agua está fria. The use of el instead of la respondes to the need of avoiding the cacophony of having two leters a together (la-agua), that could merge and dificult their understanding (lagua). Good wiking, --Mariano(t/c) 12:24, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Gotcha, you're right. I've never said ...está frio! In fact, now that I think about it, in fast colloquial speech (especially true with us Cubans!), the phrase would tend to be elided to 'l agua está fria; which was probably why I thought it different in the first place.

Jorge Padrón 04:26, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Conversely, I always though Azucar was also female, but that you said el azucar because of Cacophony. One small thing: Spanish is always capitalized (as any adjective from a word that is capitalized) --Mariano(t/c) 15:03, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Correction to a desctiption of edit

I recently added information to a paragraph to the article on Spanish nouns (specifically posted 23:18, 5 July 2007), but I incorrectly typed the description of the edit. The following is the correct form of the description: I included a brief discussion regarding the class of feminine NOUNS (not "verbs" as previously written) with an initial stressed /a/ sound, to clarify the use of the definite article with the feminine article noun "agua."

plural notion in a singular noun.

«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 get interpreted as singular feminine, and take singular verb forms; however, they do express some notion of a plural. For example, la física corresponds to English "physics", a plural.»

I'm not a linguist, but I find this argument really flawed. Is like stating a masculine noun in Portuguese express some notion of feminine because the same noun in French or Italian is feminine. We could also argue that a noun in Japanese (genderless language) express some notion of masculine gender because in Arab the corresponding word is masculine.

Not to mention I'm native in Spanish and never ever though of physics as a "plural" concept. Not even right now, as I'm writing it in the English plural form, I still "think" of the science as "one" not "several" in my mind due to Spanish.

Also I fail to see the point of this paragraph altogether. I mean, how Spanish "once had a grammatical neuter" when a Latin neutral is Spanish feminine. Spanish "neutral" got "bundled" into masculine as far as I know...

I think the paragraph should be erased. Opinions? SpiceMan (会話) 00:50, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Other kinds of multiple gender nouns

• Spanish has at least one noun pair with a masculine form used in some places and a feminine form used in other places. El computador is used for "computer" in Chile and Columbia, but la computadora is used in most other Latin American countries. Even the RAE seems to vacillate in how to treat this/these term(s). In the 22nd edition they had a single unified entry but in the 23rd edition they are moving to separe entries with computadora given an etymology stating that is derived from computador but still without an etymology for computador itself. Are there other such nouns in Spanish?
• Are there other nouns which vary in gender by region? Perhaps without evening varying the ending?
• Are there any nouns whose gender has changed over the centuries. This has certainly happened in at least Russian. — Hippietrail (talk) 04:14, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Animacy and recent edits

Following a substantial revision, several reversions were made. Rather than using edit summaries to carry on debates or negotiation over the content, I've elected to start a section on the talk page.

As it relates to the comment “of course 'persona' is animate! Must be a misunderstanding”: I wonder if there may be confusion here between “animacy” the grammatical feature and “animacy” as in whether the referent of a particular noun is actually animate. At least one of the grammars cited here considers animate nouns in Spanish to be nouns in which grammatical gender also serves to differentiate the biological sex of the referent. (In this view, “inanimate” is used essentially synonymously with “epicene”.) Under such a definition, persona would not be classed as an animate noun as its grammatical gender does not serve to differentiate the biological sex of the referent. It’s also possible that different grammars of Spanish have different definitions of grammatical animacy. (For example, many of the grammars cited in the article are a part of the traditional grammar tradition, so it is entirely possible that, say, grammars informed by modern linguistics use the term “animacy” differently.) If that can be demonstrated to be the case, perhaps we are best off cutting reference to animacy entirely and using the somewhat clunkier “nouns in which grammatical gender also serves to differentiate the biological sex of the referent” (or perhaps epicene/non- epicene). For now, I’ll revert.

As for the addition of the sustantivos ambiguous paragraph, it’s not immediately clear to me what this adds that is not already included in the variation subsection. Perhaps a case can be made for why this content should also be included here. For now, I’ll remove the unsourced paragraph and keep in the variation subsection. Whmovement (talk) 13:39, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

@Whmovement: Sorry sir, I can't find any mention of persona being inanimate in Butt & Benjamin, section 1.2. Section 1.2.9 deals with Gender of inanimate nouns when applied to humans, but that certainly doesn't affect persona. In fact I'm not sure of whether grammatical animacy has any relevance in Spanish Grammar. --Jotamar (talk) 20:11, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Now a fun point: in the page Animacy, section Animacy#Spanish, persona is used as an example of animacy in Spanish nouns. I've never edited that page. That means that, even if it were true that some grammar book considers persona an inanimate noun (which I still can't believe), that would be in clear contradiction with the more standard use of animacy (grammatical animacy). --Jotamar (talk) 21:18, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

I’m not sure this argument is entirely sound. The same basic reasoning could be used to reach the opposite conclusion: "A grammar of Spanish defines animate nouns as nouns in which grammatical gender also serves to differentiate the biological sex of the referent. I’ve never edited that grammar. That means that, even if it were true that some Wikipedia page relies on another understanding of grammatical animacy as it emerges in Spanish, that would be in clear contradiction with the more standard use of animacy (grammatical animacy)."

But while I don’t buy the argument that this other understanding of grammatical animacy as it emerges in Spanish is "the more standard use" (or that either is necessarily "more standard"), that page does serve as a good reason to believe that the definition of grammatical animacy as it is applied to Spanish is contested. Given that, it seems reasonable to use less contested terminology. Thus, I’ve replaced references to "animate nouns" with references to "certain nouns referring to humans and animals" and the like. It’s certainly clunkier, but it seems like a way of getting around the problem.

(And because we're already talking about matters related to [grammatical] gender, I do find the assumption that "sir" applies to me to be an interesting one.)Whmovement (talk) 23:18, 27 July 2022 (UTC)