3 ms·

Spanish blurs the line between non-personal pronouns and determiners, so two things might happen: either the word "defaults" to the masculine, or it's actually

Spanish blurs the line between non-personal pronouns and determiners, so two things might happen: either the word "defaults" to the masculine, or it's actually being used as a determiner, with the noun omitted - then it gets the gender of the omitted noun. A bunch of them are also genderless, such as "quién" [who], "cual" [which], etc.

jhgb 5y ago
What I mostly meant was that if the verb distinguishes gender (in Slavic languages, this is a feature of the past tense), then these pronouns impart the masculine on the verb. But now that I look at Spanish verb tenses, it's apparently not the case that the past participle in the predicate expresses the gender of the clause subject. If there's a different situation where this could arise, nothing readily comes to my mind.
- lvxferre 5y ago
  The past participle is gendered in Spanish. And it works the way I described, even with "genderless" interrogative pronouns - you'll default to the masculine, unless some omitted word "forces" the feminine. Like this: 1) Cual fue dicho? // which [one] was said.MASC 2) Cual fue dicha? // which [one] was said.FEM 3) Que fue dicho? // what was said.MASC "Dicho/a": past participle of "decir", "to say". On the first two examples, there are implicit masculine and feminine words respectively, like, dunno... "vocablo" and "palabra" (both are "word".) The third example however doesn't have anything like this, so it's defaulting to the masculine. In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]?
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Ah, apparently I missed (rather embarassingly) that some other auxiliary verbs don't use the participle in the same way that "haber" does. > In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]? No, (2) does not make sense there. The grammatical agreement is between the subject and the predicate (by definition it can't be an agreement with words that aren't even present in the sentence in the first place), and the "who" is masculine here. If I say in Czech, for example, to paraphrase it in English, "Who broke the window?", it's actually "Who broke.MASC the window?" regardless of the answer. I thought this was still preserved in Spanish because as far as I understand it, very much the same thing was possible in Latin as it is in Slavic languages but apparently Spanish ditched this at some point in the past. Interesting.
    - lvxferre 5y ago
      Got it - thanks for the info!

jhgb 5y ago

What I mostly meant was that if the verb distinguishes gender (in Slavic languages, this is a feature of the past tense), then these pronouns impart the masculine on the verb. But now that I look at Spanish verb tenses, it's apparently not the case that the past participle in the predicate expresses the gender of the clause subject. If there's a different situation where this could arise, nothing readily comes to my mind.

lvxferre 5y ago
The past participle is gendered in Spanish. And it works the way I described, even with "genderless" interrogative pronouns - you'll default to the masculine, unless some omitted word "forces" the feminine. Like this: 1) Cual fue dicho? // which [one] was said.MASC 2) Cual fue dicha? // which [one] was said.FEM 3) Que fue dicho? // what was said.MASC "Dicho/a": past participle of "decir", "to say". On the first two examples, there are implicit masculine and feminine words respectively, like, dunno... "vocablo" and "palabra" (both are "word".) The third example however doesn't have anything like this, so it's defaulting to the masculine. In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]?
- jhgb 5y ago
  Ah, apparently I missed (rather embarassingly) that some other auxiliary verbs don't use the participle in the same way that "haber" does. > In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]? No, (2) does not make sense there. The grammatical agreement is between the subject and the predicate (by definition it can't be an agreement with words that aren't even present in the sentence in the first place), and the "who" is masculine here. If I say in Czech, for example, to paraphrase it in English, "Who broke the window?", it's actually "Who broke.MASC the window?" regardless of the answer. I thought this was still preserved in Spanish because as far as I understand it, very much the same thing was possible in Latin as it is in Slavic languages but apparently Spanish ditched this at some point in the past. Interesting.
  - lvxferre 5y ago
    Got it - thanks for the info!