Monty, those are for natural genders again. I comprehend what you’re saying, though. It’s strange when I tell my wife, for example, that my car is a “she” when in Spanish – just for the article or gender – they’re simply not “she,” but “he” (el coche or el carro).
I meant to get a cite in my wife’s grammer book. She’s a native Spanish speaker and insists there are only two genders – the masculine and the feminine. The others mentioned above aren’t genders in the grammatical sense, and the words (for example) “el dentista” and “la dentista” aren’t a single word with two genders, but have entirely different meanings. One’s a female dentist, the other is a male dentist or dentist in general.
There are no examples of a neuter gender word in Spanish – they don’t exist, although they do express neuter gender for ideas and such. So you could say “lo que pasa es…” (“what happened is…”) which is neuter, but there’s no neuter noun, i.e., no specific thing in the Spanish language that’s neuter. This is opposed to a language like German that has a real neuter. “Das boot” – the boat is a neuter word. In thise sense there’s no neuter gender in Spanish.
Go down to your nearest shipyard, naval base, or whatnot. Start conversations with folks, and call all the boats “he”. That’s about what you’d sound like using inaccurate gender attribution.
You might also make the occasional inadvertant pun, which would probably be considered highly amusing.
Gender of Nouns: In addition to ships and vehicles, countries are often referred to as ‘she’. (The USSR especially, at least in movies)… I think maybe this is all some sort of maternal or sexual thing to be honest and nothing to do with the base grammar of the language (although I’m not an etymologist). ‘She’s a beaut…’ (car) ‘She’ll get us home yet…’ (captain in a storm)… ‘the motherland’… just a theory though.
As for storms, I think they name them all sequentially through the alphabet, alternating between male and female as they go (and then swapping for the next lot, so Alfred Betty Chris etc. Anna Bill Clarabelle etc. or whatever… So there can be 52 storms in a year before there is any confusion.)
Japanese - it does have plurals. You just repeat the word again with a different sound. shima = island, shimajima = islands. anata = you, anatagata = you (pl)… and so on. I don’t suppose all words will suit this style of pluralisation but you can do it with many nouns. I teach 20th Century Modernist English Literature to Japanese students when I’m not at University during the summer… (well, someone has to)… and I actually asked them the very question this year. Japanese has a fascinating grammar, because it’s not particularly like any other. (Korean is vaguely similar.)
Learning Navajo: I think the brain has an entirely different facility for learning its first language. The reason we have such trouble learning second languages is because the brain insists on representing everything to us in our first language once we have it. So we latch onto the meaning of the Navajo sentence by converting it to English (or what have you) but the Navajo itself can then be forgotten. So learning is a long slow process. But if you learn lots of languages, then you soon start speaking a veritable language salad when you’re in foreign countries as all languages are considered to be secondary to your native tongue (or tongues, if you were brought up with two…) so often picking between possible words is a non-intuitive business.
I had some other points but I’ve already forgotten what they were.
The different cases and genders let you rearrange the sentence a lot:
Der Junge schlug die Frau=Die Frau schlug der Junge
“The boy hit the woman=The woman hit the boy”, both when transated w/o looking closely at articles… but the second is equal to the first in meaning, by looking at the nominative “der” instead of accusative “den”.
I spoke to a co-worker yesterday, a Spaniard, on the issue of el radio vs. la radio. She is normally a very animated person, but I’ve never seen her get quite so animated on any topic, and especially not on the subject of grammar. (We don’t normally speak Spanish in the office, and I’ve only ever heard her speak a phrase or two; she’s been in the U.S. for a long time now.)
She insisted that no matter what parts of Latin America may think, el radio is a purely illiterate barbarism, and no educated native Spanish speaker from any country would tell you otherwise. I thought about debating the point with her, since I know a number of educated native Spanish speakers who think otherwise, but she is one tough little firecracker. She’s a good bit shorter than I am (and I’m 5’1"), but trust me, she is not a person you want pissed off at you. Let the Academia de Venezuela or whatever duke it out with the Spaniards.
I checked the dictionary of the RAE and (for this meaning) it says “radio” is short for “radiorreceptor” which is always most definitely masculine so it is a fact that those who use it as masculine are more correct. Strike 1.
Furthermore, it says it is often used as feminine in Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and as masculine in the rest of Spanish-American countries. Strike 2.
In Mexico, radio is definitely masculine IIRC.
Nobody is so ignorant as those who do not want to learn because they think they already know everything there is to know.
Vox’s online dictionary (not the best, but it still has to agree with the Real Academia), notes that the word can be either femenine or masculine, and the meanings vary with the context.
When radio is short for radiodifusión, it is probably feminine, since -sión, -ción endings are usually feminine. And that refers to the communication way, the radio waves.
When radio is short for radioreceptor, it is male, like sailor said. And it means the physical object we call radio that receives the radio waves.
And no one told your Spaniard that long ago it was established that each country or region could have its own formal Spanish dialect, no better and no less than the original Spanish from where it originated. I hope she doesn’t have a heart attack when someone from the Caribbean uses seseo and does not pronounce the s at the end of plurals.
Not quite. The radio set would have to develop a penis to be male; in the meanwhile it is merely “masculine”. Sex and gender are different things. "Persona is feminine and, often, male. “El calamar hembra” is masculine but female.
Which very probably expalins the feminine usage. When radio was new there would be much talk and print about “la radio” meaning the whole system of communication and people would substitute this concept when talking about just the radio receiver.
The same thing happened with television only there it is more obvious. Properly speaking, “televisión” means the whole concept and system of TV broadcasting station, electromagnetic waves and TV receiver which allows “vision at a distance”. The proper word for the receiver is “el televisor” but in Spain “la televisión” is susbtituted most of the time. Televisor is used in commercials and more formal speech but in colloquial conversation “televisión” is used instead.
In a way it would be like saying “turn on the Internet” in place of “turn on the computer”. It sounds more impressive.
I am currently getting a degree in Spanish as well. I may not speak it fluently but i can hold a conversation (most of my lack of great fluency is due to retaining grammar well, but vocabulary slips, which is my fault, not that of my instruction). I write and read it probably to an advanced high level.
Anyway, Most of my upper division courses are taught in Spanish, with native speakers (though i have trouble understanding some of them due to regional accents), we also were required to see facilitators (who held conversations with us), and many of our books were written solely in Spanish. If the instruction was bad, i’d have failed all of those classes (I can understand clear, precise, non-slang based spanish, such as that my instructors taught in).
In fact, my school emphasizes language instruction for ALL majors, and the business, language, and global studies students have to take courses to gain fluency to intermediate high speaking level (enough to discuss a topic with a good amount of detail and relative complexity of sentence structure). A lot of people in university here hate that requirement so much they see it as a thorn in their sides.
We were never told of the other genders Sailor mentioned. Even Ralph Penny in his book “A history of the Spanish Language” (which is extremely detailed in very informative) never makes any mention of this.
If the different “genders” were true genders you would see different articles and adjectival endings used, but such is clearly not the case.
No, the groups mentioned above are not true genders, but more a way of grouping nouns according to the way they take the genders. Not useful in language acquisition and understanding, just more Spanish semantics and language rules that nobody uses or needs to know on a daily basis.
French people hear gender errors as jarring on the ears. But they also don’t want us foreigners to speak too perfectly, because an accent and endearing little mistakes are charming.
They learn the genders in a natural way, as children, so it’s no hurdle to expression, whereas we foreigners must learn each and every noun’s gender – a monumental task.
For us writers, English is the more powerful language, because we can nuance our phrases and add more description by assigning the gender of a noun ourselves.
