I know many words in Spanish, not really enough to form sentences but my ears pop up when I hear lots of random words spoken. I know a little bit about the gender suffixes, but I don’t know why something is required to be male or female. I haven’t been curious enough to ask about it until now.
I know “los banos” means “the bathroom” and those are male gendered. I know that if something is female, the article is “la” instead of “los”. Everywhere I’ve heard los banos being used by Spanish speakers, it’s always male as shown. But this morning I overheard our housekeepers talking and one of them said “la bana”. Female!? So when or why would you use the female version?
Los baños would be the bathrooms. If there’s only one, it’s el baño. I’ve never heard of someone using la baña to mean bathroom. That doesn’t mean that people don’t but I’d assume I misheard or it’s slang or something.
edit: grammatical gender can be confusing and it doesn’t help that we associate it with biological sexes. With the exception of gender-inflected words like profesor/profesora, it’s probably easiest to pretend they’re Type A and Type B or something, instead of masculine and feminine.
Native Spanish speaker here – “baña” as a noun does not exist. However, it is a form of the verb “bañar” (=“to give a bath”. If you want to say “to take a bath” you should use the reflexive form of the verb, “bañarse”).
I can imagine of a situation where “la baña” could be correct, but then you would not be dealing with an article and a noun.
“Baña” is the 3rd. person singular of the present indicative of the verb “bañar”: baña=“he/she gives <somebody/something> a bath”.
If that is the case, then “la”, in this sentence, is not an article but a pronoun: feminine direct object (=“her”).
As you know, in Spanish usually you leave the subject out if it is a pronoun, because the relevant information is in the verb itself.
Taking this into account, “la baña” then means “<he/she> gives her a bath”.
JcWoman, would this meaning be plausible within the context of whatever your housekeepers were talking about?
I don’t know what they were talking about, since I don’t know even have enough to understand full sentences. But from context: they were organizing themselves on the second floor where the bedrooms and bathrooms are. It’s likely the one lady was telling the other one to clean the bathtub first? Or maybe she was saying that I needed to take a bath? LOL! (Actually I’m not the paranoid type who assumes everything I don’t understand is snarking about me.) But “la bana” jumped out at me, like “la puerta” did when they first came in. The one lady seems to act as a team lead or something, directing the other one what to do.
Is it also possible that they used the feminine gender because it was one woman talking to another one? Or, instead of “<he/she> gives her a bath” maybe she was saying “<you should> clean her bath”, e.g. clean the lady’s bath?
No, they would not change the gender of a word because they were women talking to each other.
If she used the word “baña”, then she absolutely, positively was using the verb.
However – could it be that you misheard and she actually said “la bañera”? Because “bañera” exists as a word and means “bathtub”. If they were assigning duties, it might be perfectly possible for one lady to say something like “<I will take care of/you will take care of> the bathtub”.
Maybe one was telling the other she had sleep* (lagaña) in her eyes.
*why don’t we have a better word for this? Sleep sounds silly and my daughter’s choice of “eye boogers” isn’t so great, either.
There is an actual meaning for baña as a noun, but it wouldn’t be very polite in this case. I do hope you don’t treat the cleaning ladies badly enough to earn it
baña: a pond or other location where wild animals bathe
I expect the actual word would be bañera, as JoseB proposed.
Oh, and correction on myself: lagaña is also a valid spelling!
I’m not a native, or even a fluent speaker, but here’s what I know (or think I know) about gender in Spanish:
– In Spanish, like most Romance languages, nouns have a gender. Nouns ending in o are almost always masculine, and nouns ending in a (and -dad I think) are almost always feminine.
– Adjectives don’t have gender but if they end with o/a the ending changes to match the noun being modified. E.g. la cerveza negra, but el libro negro. Adjectives not ending with o/a don’t change.
– Nouns ending in o/a can change if the thing actually does have a biological gender, so el perro is the male dog, and la perra is the female dog. On the other pollo is chicken and polla is penis, so … yeah.
– “the” for masculine nouns is almost always el, or los for plurals, and la/las for feminine. a/an is un for masculine and una for feminine.
Pescadero or pescatero, related to pescado (a fish that’s been fished). The place where they work, pescadería.
Atascadero comes from atascado, stuck.
In both cases, the -d- isn’t part of the final suffix, it’s part of an intermediate derivation. Both pescado and atascado originate as participles, which in Spanish is the verbal form used as an adjective.
Pez (fish, the animal) -> pescar (to fish) -> pescado (fished; a fish that’s been fished for food) -> pescador (fisherman), pescadería (fishmonger’s), pescadero (fishmonger).
Tasco (a broken piece of stiff material, the sort of stuff that tends to become stuck in pipes) -> atascar (to clog) and atascarse (to become stuck in place; to become clogged)* -> atascado (clogged, stuck) -> atascadero (place that gets clogged when things get stuck in it).
Adding to Greg Charles’ information, and completing his last point
– if a singular (f) noun begins by a-, it takes the masculine articles un and el; this is for ease of pronunciation. El águila, not la águila.
Trash atasca the pipe, it makes it clogged. The pipe se atasca, it becomes clogged. People who have started a task but can’t figure out how to continue se atascan too, their brain clogs.
From the absolutely minimal Spanish I ever learned, I seem to recall that verbs are not gendered and don’t modify their form to match the gender of the subject. Is that correct?
What about French? Are French verbs gendered?
Hebrew verbs are, in most of the forms or “structures”.
The past participle of a Spanish verb (which, as Nava said, can act as an adjective) is gendered when acting as an adjective: “I am tired” (man) = “estoy cansado”. For a woman it would be “estoy cansada”.
And yes, the same happens in French; verbal forms are generally non-gendered, personal forms are affected by number, and the participle (which as one of the impersonal forms is non-gendered, non-numbered) becomes gendered and numbered when used as an adjective.
Je ne suis pas mariée, no estoy casada: I am not married. Ils sont mariées, están casados: they are married.
