Thank you, Col. That makes more sense than my attempted reading of Google’s attempted output.
sailor, the other three categories (ambiguo, epiceno, común), are not known (or necessary taught) to schoolchildren. That is, people know that those groups exist, but they don’t know the name of the category.
And the category per se is not a gender, it’s a way of classifying words according to how/why/what gender they use.
I never was taught this in any of my high school or college classes in Spanish, either. In fact, this is the first I have heard of the names of the other three categories (I knew these kinds of nouns existed, but didn’t know there were specific names for them).
Well, yes, I can believe that. The Spanish taught in American schools is generally so basic as to be pretty worthless. I know many people who took Spanish and cannot make any use of it. I even briefly dated a Spanish teacher and she could hardly speak any Spanish. She knew less Spanish than her students should know. The state of foreign language studies in the USA is very bad.
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And the category per se is not a gender, it’s a way of classifying words according to how/why/what gender they use.
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I have no opinion other than the authorities consider there are six genders. That is what schoolbooks say, that is what the Real Academia de la Lengua says, that is what that Colombian professor’s page linked by Colibri says, that’s what all authorities say. Now if you want to argue otherwise I expect you to present cites of authorities who agree with you. It makes no difference to me. I am not a grammarian; I just speak the language.
In fact, I would be more willing to make the case that the neuter has almost disappeared from Spanish than the other three you mentioned.
Well, sailor, FWIW I have a degree in Spanish (language option) with departmental honors rfom a selective U.S. university, which included a semester in Spain. All classes in my major were conducted in Spanish, and most of my classmates were native speakers educated at least in part outside the U.S. We read things like Cervantes in the original, and yet these other genders you mention never came up.
Even in high school, where we studied grammar rather intensively, they were never mentioned. Yes, many kids who study Spanish at the high school level in the U.S. never become functional, but that was not the case in my class. We read Borges, Matute, Garcia Lorca, etc. in high school, and junio and senior year class was also conducted entirely in Spanish. Never came up then, either. We did discuss specific examples of nouns that didn’t fall into the masculine/feminine paradigm, but not using the other categories you have laid out (or at least not using those terms).
English isn’t doing without gendered nouns:
muderer/murderess
actor/actress
waitor/waitress
matron/patron
count/countess
Feel free to expand on this list. & if you don’t think it’s a big deal to a native English speaker to use the wrong gender, try calling your waiter a waitress!
Note that this does not correspond to grammatical gender in the sense we have been talking about. English has no real grammatical gender, only what may be referred to as “natural gender.” Grammatical gender governs the way articles, adjectives, and other related words change according to the class of the noun. Unless you would use a different form of an article or adjective with waiter/waitress, these words can’t be considered to have a true grammatical gender.
And that would, in fact, be grammatical gender as it is, in fact, an element of the grammar of English. Your definition is merely addressing the grammatical gender of the articles.
p.s. One does use a different qualifier (the possessive) for these words: Waiter–he/him/his, Waitress–she/her/hers.
Since I don’t have a degree in Spanish, I’d be a fool to argue with you. I’ll take Spanish lessons from you anytime you please 
(In my defense, and so you may not think I am totally worthless, I will say I am handy repairing electrical appliances and I am good at making knots, like any good sailor. 
)
It seems to me this is one of those points which can be argued round or flat. English has similar points of grammar (which come up regularly in GQ) which in the end, nobody is quite clear what is the “correct” answer. ask any native Spanish speaker to conjugate “abolir” (abolish) and you will see that not one in a hundred can do it correctly (hint: lookup “verbo defectivo”). Spanish, like English, is full of these questions which most native speakers cannot answer correctly. At least in Spanish there is an ultimate authority: http://www.rae.es
This Spanish guy sounds a bit like a nitpicking nut and complains that people use genders all wrong because they do not know about the six correct genders, etc. He sounds like it may be one of the signs of the Apocalypse.
This Mexican page also lists the six genders but what is interesting is that some words have different genders in Spain and America. Radio is feminine in Spain but ambiguous in Mexico. Sartén is masculine in Spain but ambiguous in Mexico.
The page linked by Colibri is from a Chilean University and not from Colombia as I had mistakenly said. It also mentions the six genders and some words mentioned there use different gender than they would use in Spain. You could call them transgendered. . . I guess.
Epiceno is used not only with animals but with plants which have separate male and female individuals like the palm tree.
As I say, it is not something I really have much interest in making a point of. I am far too busy keeping the government in check in GD
No, I don’t think you are quite getting the point here. Those words would only have grammatical gender in the full sense if the qualifier changed according to the word itself, not who or what was doing the possessing.
E.g., one can say “his waitress.” The possessive “his” is masculine, while the word it relates to is feminine. This is not the way grammatical gender works.
In Spanish, for example, you need to say “el camarero” (or “el mozo”) for “the waiter,” while “the waitress” must be “la camarera.” Unlike the articles, the third-person possessives do not show gender agreement, so that “his waiter” is “su camarero,” while “his waitress” is “su camarera.” If you need to distinguish between his/her waiters, you have to say “su camarero de el” vs. “su camarero de ella.”
See here for additional explanation:
Here’s more, indicating that nouns and pronouns in modern English only have what is known as natural gender, not grammatical gender as shown in other Indo-European languages:
I was taught men and boys are “he”, women and girls, “she” and babies, animals, plants and all other things “it” except that a ship may be properly referred to as “she”, that being the only exception in the English language. That’s my usage.
Hey sailor (I’ve always wanted to say that!),
Believe me, I am by no means saying that someone who happens to have a degree in Spanish trumps an educated native speaker; you are far more bilingual than I am. But I’ll agree that you’re a fool to argue with me in any case, if that makes you happy. We can even expand that to nongrammatical issues, if you’d like.
I’m awfully rusty lately, in any case…work hasn’t allowed much time lately to keep up my Spanish in any educated, literary sort of way. My point was just that even those who have made a concerted effort to educate themselves about the structure of a language don’t necessarily have all the answers, which was one of the points I believe you were trying to make as well. In fact, as you already intimated, there may be no single answer.
(Oh, and no worries, I never thought you were totally worthless in any case. Electricity and knots? Sounds like the makings of a very interesting Saturday night, if nothing else. Maybe since you know all this techie stuff, you know how I can polish the rust off my Spanish in the least painful way.)
Now this is bugging me. I think I need to go home and look it up. As for the Real Academia: they may consider themselves the ultimate authority for Castilian speakers, but millions of other native Spanish speakers around the world beg to differ, especially in terms of new vocabulary and usage. But you already mentioned some examples of that, anyway.
A nitpicking nutty Spaniard? I’m shocked! Maybe he just has gender identity issues. Too many Almodóvar movies.
I don’t remember any discussions of sartén, but my freshman HS Spanish teacher, whose education was primarily in Spain, told us that el radio is the physical object, while la radio is the abstract noun.
Well, with six genders, who wouldn’t be confused? Although I don’t know how well it would go over if you started telling Colombian guys that they had gender identity issues. The Colombians I’ve known wouldn’t take it very well at all. I suspect there would be black eyes involved at the very least.
If you think you’re keeping the government in check singlehandedly, that must be one mighty big hand you have!
I take it you have neither babies nor pets of your own.
I don’t know who taught you that, but I think I would look a bit askance at any new parents who invariably referred to their little bundle of joy as “it.” Likewise, I don’t know many pet owners who call their Fluffy “it.”
It’s quite common in English to refer to specific animals where the sex is known with the appropriate “he” or “she”. Fore example, if you had visited the late, great Secretariat in retirement at his stud farm and referred to him as “it”, you would have been corrected by his grooms (or at least laughed at).
Also, calling a ship “she” is not the “only” exception in English – it’s common on many transportation vehicles. And almost always female. Airplanes are often named; remember the “Enola Gay”? And it’s quite common to see truckers name their big rig, and paint that name right on the side. And they commonly refer to their rig as “she”.
Also, tropical storms are assigned names (both male & female, now) and people seem to use either the neutral “it” or the appropriate “he” or “she” to match the assigned name. So for this one either seems to be an accepted use.
sailor, I was taught Spanish all my life, it is my first language. and I was in good schools, dammit!
What I wanted to say was that even native speakers don’t know that terminology, such complexity is not studied until they hit… university, perhaps. They do know those groups of nouns exist, but at most, the correct terms were just mentioned casually, ie “The correct term for those nouns is epicine, moving along to the next subject…”
I believe you are mistaken and the Real Academia de la Lengua Española is the ultimate authority for Spanish in all of the world. Each Spanish-speaking country has its own academy and then they all get together somehow and have their pow-wows (I am uncertain of the details of how this works) and they decide what goes into the dictionary where you can find words and usage from countries other than Spain.
Not in Spain. A radio receiver in Spain is “la radio” while in Latin America it is “el radio”. In Spain “el radio” means the radius of a circle or the spoke of a wheel.
Colibri, you are right that I have neither babies nor pets of my own and that I do get looked at a bit askance by parents and pet-owners but I stick to what I consider correct usage because the alternative is to ask the parents repeatedly if they had said the baby was a boy or a girl. Those details may seem interesting to the parents but interest me little and tend to slip off my mind in a matter of seconds. For me, babies are in fact “it”. But there is a special place in hell for parents who talk of pets and say “is it a boy or a girl?” It’s neither a boy nor a girl! It’s a dog!
Real Academia Española is the ultimate word about the Spanish language. Every correct, accepted terminology is found in its dictionary. Every language nuance is covered by them. If you want to write something seriously, you better understand their guidelines.
Other than that, if you want to talk informally (as millions of people do, even in other languages), you could care less what they have to say. Similarly, there are some words that the Academy has yet to decide how to classify them (or took too long to classify them), and this has given some leeway to each country’s academy deciding what way is right for them to use them. In some countries, computer is el ordenador, in others it is la computadora, or el computador.
http://www.rae.es/ - Official site.
Each country that has a sizable Spanish-speaking population(22 countries, including Phillipines and United States) has an academy. They devise the standard, formal usage for that particular region/country. http://www.acaple.org/main.htm - Example from the Puertorrican Academy.