Talk:Spanish nouns

message: Hi.  I'm the main contributor to this article.  If anyone has any questions regarding Spanish grammar, I'd be happy to answer them, and incorporate the answer into the article.  Fire away!  — Chameleon 17:16, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [Untitled]

message: I've added a bit about the rare but still existing neuter gender in Spanish, as can be seen in words like esto, the neuter form of este, which comes from Latin istud, the neuter form of iste.  I am short on citations because I'm basing this on my own personal studies and experiences on Spanish and Latin, however I believe it to be accurate and looked in the RAE dictionary which seems to  back me up.  What do you guys think?  ¿Cómo os parece?  Andyluciano 20:38, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a difference between neuter and neutral. IMO esto is not a neuter version of éste and ésta (note the diacritic accents), but a "neutral" (general, non-contrastive) pronoun that means "this thing". For people the only "neuter" form is esta persona. Éste and ésta are different because they are contrastive or at least imply a previous reference. This in no way contradicts the contributions you've been making. What does the RAE say about this exactly? --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 14:45, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

text: It's been a long time but I found an interesting source on the existence of a neutral gender in Spanish.  Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos by Andrés Bello.  Throughout that, he notes that words like lo, ello, and eso have a few pecularities and gives example sentences to illustrate that.  The source is a bit dated, but I find it an interesting read.  – Andyluciano 17:09, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I looked again at my work here and removed what I now consider to be original research, and also added some information from the source above. – Andyluciano 17:40, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Does an article on Spanish nouns really need a section on "vestiges of a neuter gender" that is all about pronouns?  Eulen (5 March 2006) said it all:  "Not sure if the article needs that kind of detail." Amen! Kotabatubara (talk) 12:41, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neuter 

message: «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 get interpreted as singular feminine, and take singular verb forms; however, they do express some notion of a plural. For example, la física corresponds to English "physics", a plural.»
I'm not a linguist, but I find this argument really flawed. Is like stating a masculine noun in Portuguese express some notion of feminine because the same noun in French or Italian is feminine. We could also argue that a noun in Japanese (genderless language) express some notion of masculine gender because in Arab the corresponding word is masculine.
Not to mention I'm native in Spanish and never ever though of physics as a "plural" concept. Not even right now, as I'm writing it in the English plural form, I still "think" of the science as "one" not "several" in my mind due to Spanish.
Also I fail to see the point of this paragraph altogether. I mean, how Spanish "once had a grammatical neuter" when a Latin neutral is Spanish feminine. Spanish "neutral" got "bundled" into masculine as far as I know...
I think the paragraph should be erased. Opinions? SpiceMan (会話) 00:50, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  plural notion in a singular noun. 

message: * Spanish has at least one noun pair with a masculine form used in some places and a feminine form used in other places. El computador is used for "computer" in Chile and Columbia, but la computadora is used in most other Latin American countries. Even the RAE seems to vacillate in how to treat this/these term(s). In the 22nd edition they had a single unified entry but in the 23rd edition they are moving to separe entries with computadora given an etymology stating that is derived from computador but still without an etymology for computador itself. Are there other such nouns in Spanish?
* Are there other nouns which vary in gender by region? Perhaps without evening varying the ending?
* Are there any nouns whose gender has changed over the centuries. This has certainly happened in at least Russian. — Hippietrail (talk) 04:14, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other kinds of multiple gender nouns