in my spanish II class yesterday, after i had been signed out, the teacher told my classmates that the article “las” is used with “manos” (spanish for “hands”). why is this? it’s obviously an exception to the rule, but what is the exception? are there other words that violate article rules?
Well, because the word “hand” (mano) is feminine. As far as I know, this is one of those “it just is” exceptions to the usual gender rules. And there are lots more! You can catch many of them by following the rule that nouns ending in -ma, -pa, or -ta are (usually) masculine.
ex. - el mapa, el problema, el atleta. (unless the athlete is female. Then it’s la atleta, and you get to be even more confused.)
gha, and i thought english rules were stupid.
Because Manus was feminine in latin. The -us at the end wasn’t like the masculine second declension ending -us in campus, but a lunger and -us that was part of the fourth declension. I don’t know anything about linguistics but I’d guess all the -us endings became -o endings in spanish, but the gender stayed the same.
Not to mention the fun of el día.
Mi hermanota is a Spanish speaking lawyer and has occasionally had to convince her Latino clients that she is, indeed, una abogado. It comes from the past participle of abogar, FWIW.
Even odder in Latin, the word ‘agricola’, which means farmer, declines in the first declension (which is feminine) but is a masculine word, with masculine adjectives. Likewise with a few others I can’t think of at the moment. Poena perhaps (poet).
She would be una abogada, not una abogado. Most professions have female forms these days, e.g. juez/jueza, profesor/profesora. Abogado, I believe, comes directly from Latin advocatus.
She’s pretty firm, and I don’t argue, with the abogado for both genders. I tend to agree with her. Of course, it just goes to show that all languages are changing with time to our chagrin or glee, as it will be.
Nice examples, Dave914, though. Maybe I have some ammo with which to argue…
As a general rule, most words that seem to defy their gender endings in Spanish are of Greek or other non-Latin origin, such as “el mapa”, “la radio”, or “el programa”.
Another funny thing is I have heard “little hands” as “las manitas” or “las manitos”.
Diccionarios.com has this listing for the word:
A female lawyer is certainly una abogada.
poeta = poet
poena = punishment, and is feminine
Other 1st declension masculines (all words for occupations):
nauta = sailor
pirata = pirate
My American Heritage Spanish/English Dictionary gives both forms, and una abogada is quite definitely a currently accepted form here in Panama - I know some personally. Your hermanota is behind the times.
In addition to the examples mentioned above, abbreviated forms can result in apparent exceptions to the o/a rules: una foto, short for una fotografía; una moto, short for una motocicleta.
Also in Spanish you have la foto but foto is just a contraction of fotografía.
OTOH you have words like el agua which are feminine. The rule here is that if the first syllable starts with a stressed a the word takes the definite article el. It’s not really the masculine article, though. The feminine definite article was originally ela and the e eventually disappeared. But in the case of words starting with stressed a the e stayed and the a merged with the a of the following word.
But turning to the larger question of why languages have such shocking irregularities, there is an interesting theory.
Uncommon words (take the English verb ‘to paint’) is regular because we don’t use it enough to remember any odd behavior of the verb. Meanwhile a common verb (like ‘to do’) remains irregular as heck simply because it is so widely used. We all remember that there is no ‘doed’ and so we use ‘did.’
So anyway, the idea is uncommon words become regular over time, while common words resist regularization.
The word for hand is also feminine in those Germanic languages that still have grammatical gender (I think German and Icelandic are the only two that still retain the full gender system). In German, most one-syllable nouns that end in a consonant are masculine or neuter, and form the plural by umlaut, and perhaps postfixing an -e. Hand also behaves like a masculine in this respect. English had an umlaut plural of the word hend, as late as the Middle English period. All this suggests that hand has been feminine since before the Germanic-Italian split.
We had a thread on this topic a couple of years ago but I can’t find it now.
There isn’t a spoken language out there where established rules are followed consistently. It’s quite aggravating to the anal-retentive among us.
More enlightened minds eventually figure out that for the most part grammatical rules are established post hoc and/or out of some grammarian’s arse to explain why or describe how things are the way they are and hopefully guide how future things should be in a doomed quest for consistency.
There’s no internal logic to non-constructed languages. The man on the street just sez it like it fookin’ well is, roight ?
That goes quadruple if it’s a gendered language (like Spanish, French or German). In many cases, irregularities there are caused by a difference in outlook on the world between the speakers of the root language (mostly Latin in the case of Spanish) and the speakers of the more modern one. Id est, possibly the ancient Romans figured hands were inherently masculine in nature because they can hold a sword or some such, but the Spaniards intuitively pegged them as feminine because… something something sex.
Hence the discrepancy.
So is it el zombo, or la zomba?
I was taught that masculine nouns that end in “a” in Spanish were typically of Greek origin. It might have to do with the native Greek declensions, or maybe some historical quirk.
E.g. el programa, el sistema, el esquema (the plan, or “scheme”), el idiota, el planeta (planet, from the Greek for “wanderer”), el tema (the theme), el clima (the climate), el cometa, el diorama, el aroma, el diagrama, el enigma, etc.
I had understood that “el dia” is the only Latin-origin noun ending with -a that is masculine.