Batman and Grammatical Gender

(A brief introduction to grammatical gender in Spanish)

Learning a foreign language is a story of struggle and endurance. Loses and victories. Heroes and villains.

Just like Batman faces the Joker, you'll be chasing monsters of the likes of grammatical gender.

For this battle you won't be alone, however. I'll be with you.

Let me be your Robin.

The Joker creating linguistic chaos

GENDER IN ENGLISH FOR BEINGS?

Let's begin for your beginning: English, shall we?

English has a sort of gender when it refers to beings. Like "cow" and "bull". Or "mum" and "dad". In other words, biological gender creates a grammar distinction between some elements. One word for female and another for male.

Hey ya! Don't mess with my grammatical gender 

In Spanish this happens as well. Like vaca (cow) and toro (bull). Or 

mamá (mum) and papá (dad) 

marido (husband) and esposa (wife) 

hombre (man) and mujer (woman)

HOW SPANISH EXPRESS GENDER FOR BEINGS

But this distinction is not just taking shape in the form of different words for each gender. In Spanish we can also express this differentiation with:

1. A suffix. A suffix is something you add at the end of a word to change it. Like "less" in "harmless". In Spanish, regarding grammatical gender, the most popular ending is -a. This will turn many masculine words into feminine.

• If the word ends with -o, we swap the -o for an -a. Perro (dog) perra 
• If the word ends with consonant, we add an -a. León (lion) leona 

2. Other suffixes. There are other less common endings that turn masculine into feminine. The ending -esa: alcalde (a male mayor) to alcaldesa (a female mayor)

3. The article. (Let's stop here just for second. We'll face this little baddies again in the future). Articles are things that tell you whether something has been mentioned before or not. We'll make it easy-peasy: what's the difference in English between "THE kid" and "A kid"? In the first, the speaker assumes that their listener knows the kid they are talking about. In the second one, that kid is new to the conversation.

Articles in English 

Articles in Spanish 

So in Spanish there are words that convey this change (male/female) through the article. For example, EL piloto (a male pilot) and LA piloto (female pilot). In this group we find words ending in -ista and -ante.

El joven (the young man) / la joven (the young woman)

El pianista (the male pianist) / la pianista (the female pianist)

Un estudiante (the male student) / Una estudiante (the female student)

GENDER FOR THE REST OF WORDS

But in Spanish not only words refering to beings have gender. All nouns* (to see what's a noun go below) have a gender. They are either masculine or femenine. Just imagine for a second that a TABLE is a female object in English. Or a CAR is a male object.

Crazy, right? That's what happening in Spanish. And in French, and in Italian. And why? That's not so easy-peasy. It responds to the evolution from latin.

Knowing the gender of a word is important for the agreement with other types of words (like adjectives), which also have gender**. 

And how do we know if a word is feminine or masculine? A really good answer would be by listening and speaking a lot of Spanish. There are some useful indications that normally work well.

1. Masculine:
1. Words ending with -o: el libro (the book), un vaso (a glass), el museo (the museum) BUT la mano (the hand)
2. Days of the week: el lunes (Monday), el martes (Tuesday), el miércoles (Wednesday), etc.
2. Feminine
1. Words ending with -a: la casa (the house), la mesa (the table), una silla (a chair). BUT el mapa (the map), el problema (the problem)
2. Words ending with -ción: la canción (the song), una habitación (a room)

A FUNNY THING ABOUT GRAMMTICAL GENDER (AND ITS ABSENCE)

A language without gender can be rather ambiguous. A blurry area that comes handy to a honest adulterous.

If you like spending every Friday night with your "friend" from the gym and don't like lying to your partner, English is your language. You just need to say vaguely that you're meeting a friend and it'd be to your husband or wife to complete the gender gap with their imagination.

In Spanish, instead, we need to specify the gender amigo (our friend is a boy) or amiga (our friend is a girl).

Or we can resort to lies as well.

If you have any questions or comments, please write them below in the comments or send me and email to dasilvapereze@gmail.com

P.S:

*What's a noun? Words that typically refer to places, animals, things or qualities..

**UNA CASA BONITA (a beautiful house), but not UNA CASA BONITO. Here, the adjective BONITA has to agree with the gender of CASA (feminine). Hence the A ath the end of BONITA.