How come languages like Spanish have feminine and masculine words? What determines the "gender"?

Question

why...el sol (masculine) and la veracazuna (feminine)?

Answer 1

The way languages find their structure is rooted in history, and the majority of Indo-European languages (not just Spanish) have grammatical gender - which, by the way, has nothing to do with sex - as a result of the way the language developped. In fact, until the middle ages, English nouns were divided into 3 genders - masculine, feminine and neuter but the difference has been eroded away over the centuries and now the distinction is made only between masculine and feminine living beings (he, she) and inanimate nouns (it). But all the Western European Latin-based languages - French, Spanish, Cataln, Italian, Portuguese, Galician, Occitan(Langue d'Oc/Provençal) still continue to have masculine and feminine nouns and no neuter ("it") nouns, although Latin did have a neuter gender.

The Celtic languages, (Welsh, Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Breton, Manx, Cornish) as well as Arabic and Hebrew and also Albanian, all have masculine and feminine but no neuter, as do most Northern Indian languages, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, etc, whilst Gujerati (which is otherwise quite similar to Hindi and Punjabbi) has masculine. feminine and neuter. But Bengali and Persian, 2 very different languages which are nonetheless still related both to the other Northern Indian languages, and to the Western European languages, has no grammatical gender at all, and does not even distinguish between "he" and "she".

Other modern languages - the Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainean, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, Croatian, and so on) have three genders - masculine/feminine/neuter and so do Greek and German. Dutch - which is closely related to German - used to have 3 genders, but now only has two "common" and "neuter", and so do the Scandinavian languages, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian - (although Norwegian hasn't quite made up its mind yet, as some dialects also have a feminine gender).

Other European languages - Hungarian, Finnish, (and I believe Estonian) and Turkish have no grammatical gender and do not even have different words for "he" and "she"; it shares this characteristic with Basque, even though Basque is not related to any other of the languages mentioned.

Of all the languages I have mentioned, however, English is the only one that restricts the use of "he" to male living beings, "she" to female living beings, and "it" to everything else. It might well be more appropriate, therefore, to ask why doesn't English behave like other languages in terms of grammatical gender?

Answer 2

The general rule although with exceptions, is that if the noun ends in an "a" it is feminine, if it ends in an "o" it is masculine. But if the word starts with an "a" then, in order to avoid a double a pronounciation, it should be masculine, for example "el agua" and not "la agua", "el hada" and not "la hada". Hada begins with an h, but h in Spanish is silent.
Native language

Answer 3

Because somewhere back in history soembody decided that sol is "el" and veracazuna is "la". There is no rule for determining which is which. The idea of gender like that goes back to the Latin and before that Greek languages. Most genders were determined somewhere in the ancient Greek hundreds of years BC.

Answer 4

well the reason is obvious..... they grew up with genders, are used to genders, because tha'ts how the language developed. Why would you change it to make it easier for others? and English used to have genders, however it was done away with (ie- The Olden tavern) in short there really is no reason, they're just there..... why a train would be feminine and a Door would be masculine doesn't really have any meaning.

Answer 5

Spanish comes from Latin and in Latin there were three genders : feminine, masculine and neutral.
The gender of a noun was determined, in most cases, by the end of the noun : a noun ending with -us, for instance, was always masculine (dominus, etc.) and a noun ending with -a was (almost) always feminine (villa, etc.).
In Spanish, words have evolved and in most cases have lost their latin ending but the gender remained (except for the neutral wich disapeared).

Answer 6

As a matter of fact english too. It took me a very long time to understand why, when they talk about a ship, they say: "there SHE is."
Besides, French, Italian, and other languages have them too. German has even neutral words. That happens due to the evolution of the language.
About what determines the gender, usually words that end in O are male and words that end in A are female

Answer 7

Just one tiny correction, or maybe an addition, to GrahamH's excellent description of grammatical gender. It is true that Spanish has no neuter nouns per se - the neuter and masculine of Latin were both rolled up into the masculine in Spanish. So, Latin "textus" (masculine) and "verbum" (neuter) both became Spanish masculines: "texto" and "verbo."

However, there are several pronouns that are considered to be neuter, which are used somewhat like English's neuter "it" used for inanimate objects or concepts (more the latter in Spanish, I believe). Of these, one is rather uncommon ("ello", neuter of "él"/"ella"), but others are exceedingly common: "lo" (neuter of "el"/"la") and "esto/eso" (neuter of "este/ese".)

"Lo" in particular seems to show up almost as often as "que", in sentences like:

Lo bueno sobre eso fue ... (The good thing about that was...)
Quiero saber lo que debo hacer. (I want to know what I should do.)
Dime más sobre lo de la copa mundial. (Tell me more about that thing [that happened, or that you mentioned before] in the World Cup.)

Answer 8

basically it is the ending on the word.....

in the spanish language it's like this:

a word with an a ending is pretty much always feminine

a word with an o ending is pretty much always masculine