Feminine Masculine what's the deal?

Originally posted by Ikki I think that pinguin explained this days ago but i can't find it. In spanish, generally, the feminine end in -a and the masculine in -o, and this can be useful for sustantives and adjetives, see: Casa (house), femenine Edificio (building), masculine Casa amarilla (yellow house), femenine Edificio amarillo (yellow building), masculine There is a lot exceptions of course but this is the usual.

That's right. I think the problem with Spanish it is that we don't have a neutral gender,so we are forced to put a gender into any object. It is weird, but we are so acustummed to it we don't even notice it.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley This system makes the language harder to learn, unfortunately, but it pays off in the end by allowing the creation of complex sentences that would be impossible to build using English grammar. My guess would be that languages like English and Turkish dispensed with gender because they developed in more multi-ethnic environments where ease of learning was a bigger consideration.

IRCC the Turkic languages never had grammatical gender in the first place. Uralic and Mongolic languages are the same way. Proto-Indo-European had grammatical gender, but it is thought that it evolved from a language without grammatical gender.

English lost grammatical gender in the 10th and 11th centuries  because it lost almost all it's grammatical case suffixes. English is an analytic language with a grammar based on strict word order and use of helping verbs.

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley My apologies. You're right, of course. I suppose I could defend myself by saying I chose the word "dispensed" because it can mean either "got rid of" or "did without entirely", but I'd be lying if I claimed I was being that careful.

Touche!!!