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These include the grammatical custom (inherited from Latin) of using a grammatically masculine plural for a group containing at least one male; the use of the masculine definite article for infinitives (e.g. el amar, not la amar); and the permissibility of using Spanish male pronouns for female referents but not vice versa (e.g. el que includes ...
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T-V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis.
una mujer = "a woman" unas mujeres = "some women" Near-synonyms of unos include unos cuantos, algunos and unos pocos. The same rules that apply to feminine el apply to una and un: un ala = "a wing" una árabe = "a female Arab" una alta montaña = "a high mountain" As in English, the plural indefinite article is not always required:
For example, el café 'café' has the plural form los cafés while the noun el tabú 'taboo' has the plural forms los tabús and los tabúes. Polysyllabic nouns that end in an -s following an unstressed vowel do not add an overt plural morpheme while other nouns ending in -s behave as expected for a noun ending in a consonant, adding -es to ...
The grammatical gender of a noun affects the form of other words related to it. For example, in Spanish, determiners, adjectives, and pronouns change their form depending on the noun to which they refer. [8] Spanish nouns have two genders: masculine and feminine, represented here by the nouns gato and gata, respectively.
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics that come before the verb or as enclitics attached to the end of the verb in different linguistic ...
In Spanish, adjectives agree with what they refer to in terms of both plurality (singular/plural) and grammatical gender (masculine/feminine). For example, taza (cup) is feminine, so "the red cup" is la taza roj a , but vaso (glass) is masculine, so "the red glass" is el vaso roj o .
Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases (Russian follows a similar pattern); German, where the third-person plural sie (capitalized as Sie) is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where ...