I’m trying to learn Spanish and find it interesting and frustrating to learn all the masculine and feminine aspects of the language.
I wonder how often native Spanish speakers make mistakes with regard to this.
For example, how wrong is it to say “la gato”, “the cat”?
Is it common to use the wrong articles in humour?
For example, is “la hombre” funny?
Thanks in advance.
In my experience, mistakes regarding word gender are extremely rare, with the possible exception of words like águila or agua, which despite ending in a take a masculine article, e.g. El agua clara.
I am not a native speaker, but know enough to answer some of your questions:
It would be rare for someone to make this mistake on a common word. It’s a little like saying “a book” but “an oven” It’s just automatic. The only trouble would come from a really obscure word, or a recent borrowing from a foreign language - is the Japanese organized crime group La Yakuza or El Yakuza ?
I haven’t seen this in humor, but there are more than 20 Spanish speaking countries, so I wont say it never happens.
Also search the archives, if you can. This topic has come up before.
Usually, female words end up or have as a last vocal an A. There are plenty, plenty of exceptions.
Native speakers usually know those exceptions, and even the most illiterate ones hardly ever make that mistake… hardly ever, but it happens. “Moto” (bike), short for “motocicleta” (motorbike) should be female (“la moto”), since it’s shortened from a word ending in -a… but some people will go and say “el amoto”. That would be real lower class speak, though.
La Yakuza. Loan words tend to follow regular grammar too, I think.
That’s only in the case of singular articles, to avoid having two “a’s” in a row. El/un agua is easier to say than la/una agua. In the plural it’s las aguas claras.
It might be mentioned that different senses of the same word may differ in gender. My favorite is that “la papa” is “the potato,” while “el papa” is the Pope.
Mismatching genders is called concordancia vizcaína (“Biscay matching”) in the Basque-speaking areas (1). Basque words can refer to different genders/sexes (there are different words for “bull” and “cow”) but they aren’t gender-paired like Spanish words often are, so people who are thinking in Basque and speaking in Spanish tend to make that mistake. In a native it’s considered extremely cringe-worthy; in a foreigner, it’s more or less bad depending on how good or bad their Spanish is.
(1) the full line is concordancia vizcaína: pollo gorda, gallina flaco (Biscay matching: he-chicken she-fat, hen he-thin). Part of the joke is that one of the possible grammatically correct versions of the first pair, polla gorda, has the double meaning of she-fat she-chicken and of fat dick. Anybody who wants to see more concordancia-based jokes, search youtube for “Vaya semanita”, an old and very long-running Basque-tv-in-Spanish program. The same team came up with Ocho apellidos vascos, apparently called Spanish affair in English.
The Japanese criminal organization is la yakuza (no caps) but its members, being generally male, are los yakuza (el yakuza if only one).
Yes, partly because the rule as stated is missing an important part. The actual rule is:
when a word has gendered versions which differ only on the last syllable, the male version usually ends in o and the female version usually ends in a.
Even with the added condition, it’s not a universal rule.
In your example of el amoto, what makes it lower-class is the use of the regionalism. That’s quite general: normally when speaking to someone from a different dialect you’re supposed to avoid words you know to be dialectal. 90% of Paco Martínez Soria’s or Chiquito’s shticks consisted of using dialectal words in settings in which they’re supposed to be avoided.
Hebrew is even messier, but not with the definite articles. Hebrew nouns have separate forms (mostly endings) for masculine and feminine, and distinct plural forms for masc. and fem. Adjectives must match nouns in both gender and number. And verbs must match nouns in both gender and number (as well as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person), not to mention all the multitude of conjugations.
Yes, but are there any Hebrew parallels to the Spanish regional jokes?
ETA you forgot to mention Hebrew has dual numbers in addition to singular and plural…
In any case I’d be surprised if simple grammatical mistakes by a native in any language would be anything but cringe-worthy.
I’m not a native speaker, but in my experience, Spanish speakers are much more attentive to grammar than English speakers. It is not considered rude or insulting for a Spanish speaker to correct someone’s misuse of the language, and “poetic license” is a concept that does not exist. It is either correct or it’s not., even as a line of poetry, and the Argentine poet Borges refused to write in Spanish for that reason.
When new technological words are added to the Spanish language (computadora, telefono), they are assigned the gender of the Latin or Greek root that they came from, and spelled accordingly. Words of modern etymology (byte, hot dog) are generally assigned masculinity.
Spanish has the number matching as well, and the adjectives must match gender and number. The only verbal form which needs to match is the past participle, but exclusively in its usage as an adjective, not when a verbal form:
He ido a la tienda: I’ve gone to the store. I’m female but because it’s a verbal form, the participle is ido.
Últimamente estoy ida: lately I don’t know where my head has gone. In this case it acts as an adjective, so it must match both gender and number.
Actually, yes it does. Heck, it even has a dictionary entry! In poetry (spoken or sung) it can include “bad” grammar, unusual usages, or unusual pronunciation (it’s not uncommon to change the stress of words); in prose it tends to be more limited.
Borges’ lament over Spanish rigidity seems to be highly overblown and extremely badly reported; I’ve had other people claim that his complaint was about the impossibility to express certain concepts in Spanish (which makes zero sense for someone of his cultural level unless he was 13yo when he wrote it). If he had refused to write in Spanish we wouldn’t have the Aleph, Poemas del alma…
I’ve been told that native speakers of French essentially never err on gender. Also if given a nonsense word, they will generally have a strong intuition as to what its gender should be. On the other hand a native Italian speaker I know tells me that there are a number of nouns whose gender in her native dialect is different from that of Rome (she was born about 100 miles north of Rome, moving here when she was 12). The only way that could happen, AFAIK, is that some people started using it wrong and the usage spread. Also note la cuenta in Spanish and le compte in French. There are many such examples.
I remember the first time I (partially) got such a joke when I was first learning Spanish. I was watching an old comedy movie on TV in Mexico – there was a large copy of the Mona Lisa on a wall and suddenly the person in the picture stood up and walked out of the painting and turned out to be a man. One of the characters said “No es Mona Lisa. Es Mono Liso.”
I got the a/o thing but the friend I was watching with explained that mono (monkey) is also used to mean an imitator as in ‘monkey see, monkey do’.
And yes, you do get used the gender endings with experience. When you’re first learning a language people tell you you speak it very well … until you do … then they don’t say anything.
Which is a pretty nasty case, in Spanish:
compte in French (or conto in Italian) refer to a lot of different things you can count, account or recount. They include accounts (as in “general ledger” for example), calculations, the results of calculations (such as restaurant bills) - and tales.
And then Spanish had to go and distinguish between la cuenta - which has to do with counting or accounting: accounts, counting beads (and from there prayer beads and decorative beads), calculations, the results of calculations… and el cuento, which is recounted: the tale.
For someone who grew up with the distinction it’s perfectly clear. For someone who didn’t, it’s a pain to keep track of. I’m reasonably sure we didn’t do it on purpose, but who knows.
My understanding is that, where native speakers of English learn only the noun, native speakers of languages with gendered nouns grow up learning the noun and its article as a single entity. They would simply not have experienced the idea that, e.g., moon=lune, and then have to remember as well that it’s a feminine noun.
Hmm. French also distinguishes le compte from le conte, except they’re both masculine, as is the root (AFAIK) word computus, which is masculine in Latin as well. So not sure what is happening in Spanish in this case?
French certainly also has the usual word gender pairs le tour vs la tour and so on.
I can’t speak for Spanish, but in German there are even more possibilities because we have a third, neuter gender. Confusing articles is extremely rare among native speakers, except for cases of loan words which are mostly from English nowadays, but most people take an intuitive approach to it. But yes, there are jokes based upon using the wrong article mockingly. Though actually using articles with proper names is ungrammatical, it’s used in colloquial speech all the time. So Angela Merkel should be *die *Merkel (female), but for some reasons that might have to do with her general appearance, she is often referred to as das Merkel (neuter).
Which reminds me of one of my favorite Dorothy L. Sayers short stories, in which the solution to the mystery hinges on just that fact. Because its title appearing in this thread will give away the twist, I’ll spoiler it; I think it’s one of my favorites simply for the cleverness of the title:
The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question
I just heard an interview on the radio the other day. There was a brief explanation at the start that explained “Latinos” were going to be referred to as “Latin X” so as to not be gender-biased.
I recall way back in the 1970’s when feminism was just getting rolling - a Toronto newspaper published an article about a contentious issue and mentioned “alderman Sally Jones (I forget the actual name) and Alderperson John Sewell”. Mister Sewell was an extreme progressive type - and while using the neuter noun for him may not have implied he was gay, it obviously was a shot at his manhood since he was a sensitive new age type, coupled with the traditional title to describe a female council member.
I wonder if this is an occasional insult in gendered languages, to use the wrong gender of article deliberately to denigrate someone’s gender role?