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Another sign that Spanish once had a grammatical neuter exists in words that derive from neuter plurals. In Latin, a neuter plural ended in -a, and so these words today in Spanish are interpreted as feminine singulars and take singular verb forms; however, they do express some notion of a plural. [citation needed]
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 ...
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:
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 .
The Spanish neuters lo and ello have no plural forms. Some words are masculine in Spanish, but feminine in Portuguese, or vice versa. A common example are nouns ended in -aje in Spanish, which are masculine, and their Portuguese cognates ending in -agem, which are feminine.
"Cuyo" is the formal Spanish equivalent for the English pronoun "whose". However, "cuyo" inflects for gender and number (cuyos m. pl., cuya f. sg., or cuyas f. pl.) according to the word it precedes. For example: Alejandro es un estudiante cuyas calificaciones son siempre buenas = "Alejandro is a student whose grades are always good"
Some Spanish-speaking people advocate for the use of the pronouns elle (singular) and elles (plural). [14] Spanish often uses -a and -o for gender agreement in adjectives corresponding with feminine and masculine nouns, respectively; in order to agree with a gender neutral or non-binary noun, it is suggested to use the suffix -e.
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.