Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Spanish and Portuguese termination -o usually denotes the masculine, and is normally changed to feminine by dropping the -o and adding -a. The plural forms are usually -os and -as respectively. Adjectives ending in -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. "the English", "the
Adjectives whose lemma does not end in -o, however, inflect differently. These adjectives almost always inflect only for number. -s is once again the plural marker, and if the lemma ends in a consonant, the adjective takes -es in the plural. Thus: caliente ("hot") → caliente, caliente, calientes, calientes
Spanish generally uses adjectives in a similar way to English and most other Indo-European languages. However, there are three key differences between English and Spanish adjectives. In Spanish, adjectives usually go after the noun they modify. The exception is when the writer/speaker is being slightly emphatic, or even poetic, about a ...
Adjectives ending -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. the English, the Cornish). So can those ending in -ch / -tch (e.g. the French, the Dutch) provided they are pronounced with a 'ch' sound (e.g. the adjective Czech does not qualify). Where an adjective is a link, the link is to the language or dialect of the same name.
There are many more words that can be used as determiners in Spanish. They mostly end in -o and have the usual four forms (-o, -a, -os, -as) to agree with the noun. ¡Otra cerveza, por favor! = "Another beer, please!" Mucha gente pasa por aquí = "Many people pass through here" No hay tanta gente como en verano = "There are not as many people ...
When the final consonants in these endings are dropped, the result is -u for both; this became -o in Spanish. However, a word like Latin iste had the neuter istud; the former became este and the latter became esto in Spanish. Another sign that Spanish once had a grammatical neuter exists in words that derive from neuter plurals.
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 second part of a binomial is often a person's name in the genitive case, ending -i (masculine) or -ae (feminine), such as Kaempfer's tody-tyrant, Hemitriccus kaempferi. The name may be converted into a Latinised form first, giving -ii and -iae instead. Words that are very similar to their English forms have been omitted.