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Many grammars of Spanish suggest that nouns ending in -a are feminine, [14] [15] but there is no requirement that Spanish nouns ending in -a be feminine. [10] Thus, grammars that pose such a requirement also typically include a long list of exceptions, such as el alerta 'alert', el bocata 'sandwich', el caza 'fighter plane', and many others.
The Spanish copulas are ser and estar.The latter developed as follows: stare → *estare → estar. The copula ser developed from two Latin verbs. Thus its inflectional paradigm is a combination: most of it derives from svm (to be) but the present subjunctive appears to come from sedeo (to sit) via the Old Spanish verb seer.
(In both Spanish and Italian, these may be formed similarly, e.g. igualito – diminutive of igual, same and pochino or pochettino - diminutive of poco, a little/a few). Many variants of Swabian also have a plural diminutive suffix: -la. E.g.: "oi Mädle, zwoi Mädla."
When a noun refers to people or animals with natural gender, grammatical gender typically corresponds. The gender each noun is written in is the opposite of arbitrary. Because most nouns have a masculine and a feminine form, the form the given noun is written in could change the entire structure of the sentence. As in most other Romance ...
The Spanish conjunctions y ('and') and o ('or') alter their form in both spoken and written language to e and u respectively when followed by an identical vowel sound. Thus, padre e hijo ('father and son'), Fernando e Isabel ('Ferdinand and Isabella'), sujeto u objeto ('subject or object'), vertical u horizontal ('vertical or horizontal').
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
Monosyllabic nouns ending in a consonant receive an epenthetic final /e/, as in /ˈrem/ > /ˈren/ > /ˈrene/ > French rien. [30] Phonemic vowel length gradually collapses via the following changes (which only affect vowel length, not quality): [31] Long vowels shorten in unstressed syllables. Long vowels shorten in stressed closed syllables.
Numerals below one hundred consist of a root numeral for the tens and a root numeral for the ones, concatenated with a hyphen, i.e. 42 quaranta-duo 'forty-two'. For example, the number 2345 would be duo milles tres centos quaranta-cinque 'two thousand three hundred (and) forty-five', which corresponds to the expression 2 × 1000 + 3 × 100 + 40 ...