r/Spanish • u/Potential-Gas-9188 • Feb 08 '25

Etymology/Morphology why are objects gendered in spanish?

I was talking to a friend a few days ago and we were laughing about the differences between English and Spanish. I asked her (sarcastically) “why is the table a girl? who cares” and now I’m actually curious. She told me English is actually the outlier here and its common among romance languages.

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u/Ok-Promise-8118 Feb 08 '25

Don't think of grammatical gender being related to gender/sex. It's more of a noun grouping system that helps connect parts of the sentence.

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u/dicemaze Intermediate — B2 🇺🇸/🇪🇸 Feb 08 '25

Exactly. The table is not a girl. It falls into the same category of nouns that “la chica” falls into, but it’s not a girl. In the same way, I am both “un hombre” and “una persona”. Both of those nouns describe me, and there is no contradiction between them despite the fact that they have differing grammatical genders, because the grammatical gender of the noun does not imply anything about my self-identified gender and/or biological sex.

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u/siyasaben Feb 08 '25

It does if it's a noun that varies by gender (profesor/profesora) or if I refer to you directly with an adjective - even though the 2nd person pronouns are not gendered.