The lexeme ‘lexema’, also known as ‘root’, carries the meaning of the word. The morphemes ‘morfemas’ indicate its accidents and, in the case of the Spanish noun, those are of gender and number.
One of the characteristic differences concerning the accident of gender between Polish and Spanish nouns is that in Spanish the gender is sometimes shown by an additional morpheme called article (‘artículo’/ rodzajnik), that takes the form of ‘el’ for the masculine and ‘la’ for the feminine in singular, and los for the masculine and las for the feminine in plural. The article is placed in front of a noun that appears in context.
All of the morphemes taken by the Spanish nouns in order to show gender and number can be shown as in the chart bellow.
origen
masculino
femenino
plural
género
número
cattu (lat)
el
gato
gat
o
gat
a
s
monachos (gr)
el
monje
monj
e
monj
a
s
leone (lat)
el
león
león
-
león
a
s
-nu (lat)
la
mano
mano
-
mano
-
s
lexema
morfema
lexema
morfema
s
The reference to the meaning made for the lexeme is easily seen when we compare the Spanish noun to the Latin or Greek word of its origin. The morpheme -s- (in some cases -es-) indicates the plural and the absence of morphemes indicates the singular number. This does not happens with the morphemes that show gender because they may not appear in nouns neither masculine nor feminine gender (león, mano). Nevertheless, as the examples above seem to confirm the fact that the morphemes -o- and -e- refer, mainly, to the masculine gender and the morpheme -a- to the feminine, the following chart can be of some help to the beginner student of Spanish, in order to determine the gender of a Spanish noun:
Noun Gender
Género
Terminación
Ejemplo
Masculino
-o-, -e-, consonante
médico, diseñador, estudiante
Femenino
-a-, -e-
cosa, diseñadora, estudiante
But it’s important to keep in mind that this is not always true, so the only way to be sure about the gender of a Spanish noun is to check it in the dictionary, or to remember the article that goes with it.
