GENDER OF NOUNS IN SPANISH IX overview

Here is a brief summary of what we learned throughout this series, in order to finish clearing up any possible confusion that may have been generated by the repetition of so many categories.

All nouns in Spanish assume a gender, masculine or feminine. Of course, there are nouns that do not designate sexual beings but objects. A chair (silla) or a telephone (telefono) do not have a sex, but the former is feminine and the later masculine in Spanish. The distinction is important because we must match the gender of the noun with the gender of the articles, adjectives, and other modifiers connected to it. We say "la mesa" and "el teléfono". "El mesa" or "la teléfono" would be totally wrong grammatical constructions. 

In the cases mentioned in the previous paragraph, all the elements of a category of objects or things always have the same gender. There is neither a masculine grammatical form for "silla" nor a feminine one for "teléfono". The first is always grammatically masculine and the second feminine. This is different, however, with sexual beings such as humans or animals, where members of the same category can be either male or female. Speaking, for example, of human professions, we have to differentiate the gender of people doing the same job. We can have, for example, a "doctor", who is a male doctor, but we can also have a "doctora", who is a female doctor.

Regarding the grammatical way in which these differences can be expressed, it is possible to find three cases: 

1) Both the noun used for each gender and the modifiers attached to it (such as articles and adjectives) change. The changes on the noun can be of the last letter, of a larger part of the word or of the whole word. Examples of each case with their respective articles are: el hijo / la hija (the son/daughter), el actor / la actriz (the actor/actress), el toro / la vaca (the bull / the cow).

2) The noun remains the same, but the modifiers attached to it (such as articles and adjectives) change depending on the gender of the being to which it refers. Example: El estudiante / la estudiante (the male studente/ the female student).

3) Both the noun and the modifiers attached to it (such as articles and adjectives) remain the same for each gender. Example: La ballena (the whale, whether it is male or female). This case can be confused with the one exposed in the second paragraph of this post, but they are not the same. They are similar in the fact that in both cases the noun always assumes the grammatical form of only one gender. "Silla" (chair) is always femenine and "teléfono" (telephone) is always masculine, así como "ballena" (whale) is always femenine and "personaje" (character) is always masculine. The difference is that while in the first case what is being talked about (a chair or a telephone) does not really have a sex, in the second it does have one, which may or may not coincide with the gender of the noun. The whale can be a male whale and even then it is expressed in Spanish through the feminine gender.

"Diego, la tortuga macho que salvo a su especie en las Galapagos" (Diego, the male tortoise who saved his species in the Galapagos).