Spanish nouns

The Spanish language has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. All nouns have a conventional grammatical gender. Countable nouns inflect for number (singular and plural). However, the division between uncountable and countable nouns is more ambiguous than in English.

Gender

All Spanish nouns have one of two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine (mostly conventional, that is, arbitrarily assigned). Most adjectives and pronouns, and all articles and participles, indicate the gender of the noun they reference or modify.

In a sentence like "Large tables are nicer", the Spanish equivalent, Las mesas grandes son más bonitas, must use words according to the gender of the noun. The noun, mesa ("table"), is feminine in Spanish. Therefore, the article must be feminine too, and so la instead of el, is required. However, mesas is plural here, so we need las rather than la. The two adjectives, whether next to the noun or after the verb, have to "agree" with the noun as well. Grande is a word which is invariable for gender, so it just takes a plural marker: grandes. Bonito is a word that can agree for both gender and number, so we say bonitas to go with mesas. A student of Spanish must keep in mind all these features when making sentences.

Noun gender

In general, most nouns that end in -a, -ción / -sión and -ad are feminine; the rest of the nouns, which usually end in -o or a consonant, are masculine.

Nouns can be grouped in the following categories:

Determining gender from endings

Nouns ending in -o are masculine, with the notable exception of the word mano ("hand") and a few words, which are reduced forms of longer words: foto ("photo") from fotografía, and moto ("motorcycle") from motocicleta; -a is typically feminine, with notable exceptions; other vowels and consonants are more often than not masculine, but many are feminine, particularly those referring to women (la madre) or ending in -ción/sión, -dad/tad, -ez (la nación, la televisión, la soledad, la libertad, la vejez).

A small set of words of Greek origin and ending in -ma, "-pa", or "-ta" are masculine: problema ("problem"), lema ("lemma, motto"), tema ("theme, topic"), sistema ("system"), telegrama ("telegram"), poeta ("poet"), planeta ("planet"), etc.

Words ending in -ista referring to a person can generally be either gender: el artista, la artista, "the artist, the female artist". The same is true of words ending in -ante or -ente, though sometimes separate female forms ending in -a are used.

Words taken from foreign languages may:

Gender of proper nouns (names)

Names of people

People's names agree with the sex of the person, even if they appear to be the opposite:

Names of settlements

Usage for places varies. You can choose between making them:

With examples like New York, the Nueva is a fixed part of the name and so cannot be made masculine, but New Mexico is translated as Nuevo México and considered masculine, since México is a masculine noun.

Rivers

Rivers are masculine because of the underlying masculine noun río. The ancient Roman belief that rivers (amnes) were male gods may also influence this. Locally, a few rivers may be feminine, but the masculine is always safe and correct.

Vestiges of a neuter gender

While Spanish is generally regarded to have two genders, its ancestor, Latin, had three. The transition from three genders to two is mostly complete; however, vestiges of a neuter gender can still be seen. This was noted by Andrés Bello in his work on the grammar of Latin American Spanish.[1]

Most notably, this is seen in pronouns like esto, eso, aquello, and ello, which are the neuter forms of este, ese, aquel, and él, respectively. These words correspond with English "this", "that", "that" (more common than aquello), and "it". Additionally the word lo, while usually masculine, can be considered neuter in some circumstances. It can also be used in the place of el to be a neutral form of the article "the", as in lo mismo, "the same". Bello also notes that words such as nada, poco, algo, and mucho can be used as neuters in some contexts.

Neuter forms such as esto were preserved because unlike most nouns in Latin, the difference between masculine and neuter for these pronouns did not depend on a final consonant. For example, most second declension Latin neuter singulars in the nominative case ended in -um, the non-neuter counterpart often ending in -us. When the final consonants in these endings are dropped, the result is -u for both; this became -o in Spanish. However, a word like Latin iste had the neuter istud; the former became este and the latter became esto in Spanish.

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.

Number

There are two grammatical numbers: singular and plural. The singular form is the one found in dictionaries (base form). The plural is indicated in most words by adding -s if the base form ends in an unstressed vowel or stressed -é, or -es if it ends with a consonant or a stressed vowel other than -é. Note that final -y in words like rey, though phonetically a vowel, counts as a consonant (rey → reyes). The addition of -es to certain nouns produces changes in the placement of stress, thereby affecting the presence of accent marks (canción → canciones, bongó → bongoes but rubí → rubíes), and causes a spelling change in stems ending in -c, -g and -z (lápiz → lápices, frac → fraques). Words ending in an unstressed vowel followed by -s or -x are unchanged in the plural.[2]

The masculine gender is used for plural forms of mixed sexes (it is inclusive): los niños, grammatically masculine, may mean "the children" or "the boys". The feminine gender is exclusive in the plural: las niñas = "the little girls". When male sex needs to be shown exclusively in the plural, phrases such as los niños varones are used. Feminists (and their satirists) try to reverse the pattern with phrases such as las personas humanas jóvenes varones = "the young male human people".

Some words are formally always grammatically plural: pantalones "trousers", tijeras "scissors". In many dialects, however, these words are taken to be semantic plurals, and their singular forms are used instead: pantalón, tijera.

In expressions with an indefinite determiner, singular forms are used (unlike English, where "some" and "any" tend to modify plural nouns).

Forms of ninguno ("no") always take singular noun phrases, even where plurality might be intended:

The determiner cualquiera has a plural form (cualesquiera), but it is never used outside formal or technical contexts.

Diminutives, augmentatives and suffixes

A very productive set of suffixes can be added to existing nouns and adjectives to form new Spanish nouns. This usually just slightly modifies the meaning, but sometimes it creates something new entirely.

The most common subset of such suffixes are the diminutives, which convey the idea of smallness, delicateness, etc. (also for endearing terms). The most common diminutive in Spanish is -it-. It is added to the root of the noun, and in actual usage, it takes the proper agreement for gender and number.

In other cases, this ending can be pejorative or belittling.

When the word does not end in a vowel, -it- becomes -cit- for diminutives if the word ends in something other than an unstressed "-o" or "-a". Agreement marks are added to it according to the gender and number:

This is slightly modified when the base word ends in z. Because z and soft c are the same sound in Spanish, an epenthetic e is inserted (notice the orthographic change): pez → pececito / pecezote. There is nothing fixed when the base ends in other consonants: azúcar → azuquítar or azuquita / azucota.

When words end in -s or -te, there are varied approaches.

Idiomatic diminutives

The choice of diminutive is often a mark of regional dialects and influence of coexistent Romance languages. Educated speakers who would use -ito / -ita or no diminutive at all in more formal speech may use local forms when they want a friendlier or more colourful way of expressing themselves, sometimes borrowing another region's diminutive.

So, instead of the standard -ito, you could find:

In fossilised forms, these can be found in standard words, such as puerta → portillo, burro → borrico, Venecia → Venezuela, paño → pañuelo, calle → calleja → callejuela etc.

Sometimes different suffixes are used for variety when more than one is used at once:

Other suffixes

As well as being an Andalusian (especially Seville) alternative to -ito, the suffix -illo is also a special diminutive with a nuance of "a funny sort of...". It is also used to create new nouns:

An example of the same phenomenon, but using an augmentative, is -ón:

Another suffix that can either denote a blow with or be an augmentative is -azo:

References

  1. ↑
  2. ↑ Plural forms of nouns (regular and exceptions), spanishdict.com (retrieved 2014-07-10)
  3. ↑ "Cafetín de Buenos Aires". Retrieved 15 February 2017.
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