Okay, you may think “WTF?!” right now because of the simple word I have today. But in reality, it’s not really easy as it looks.
Yes, I always say el agua, although some natives(!) tend to say la agua. Which one is correct? Without sounding cocky; el agua, of course. So far, for me this never caused any problem.
Why did it never cause a problem for me? Because I never had to say aguas – the plural form. Now, you may think the because it’s el agua it’s also los aguas. But that is wrong!
Because of the nice irregular nature of Spanish it is indeed el agua but in the plural form it suddenly because feminine, thus las aguas. Officially, agua is a feminine noun that receives the masculine article in the singular.
To be honest; I didn’t know this until yesterday. After reading this tweet I looked it up in the dictionary and it appeared to be true. This also proves that it really earns to follow @escuelai.
UPDATE: Received two replies from @jillybean65:
@spanishonly No, no lo es. Las palabras femininas que empiezan con ‘a’ lleva ‘el’ en vez de la, pero siguen siendo femininas. Es el sonido.
@spanishonly así que… no se dice ‘el agua frío, sino el agua fría. Lleva ‘el’, un poco semejante a ‘a/an’ en ingles.
This means that -like I said- it is indeed a femine noun, but that el is only used to make it easier to pronounce. Thank you Jill!
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Todavía te gusta ahí entre los españoles? Ve a hablarme de nuevo un dia, quiero hablar mucho
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Gracias por todo que escribi aquí, es muy útil. En fato es muy logico, almenos me parece asi
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Hasta la vista!
you didn’t put in any example sentences for me to scrape! i really appreciate your words of the day, ramses, keep it up.
its funny, in one of these crappy spanish grammar workbooks i read way back when, this agua exception was described in one of the first couple pages on nouns and gender. on one hand, i’m glad i read that early on, and i’m more aware of these little details, on the other, i’m glad to see that someone who’s in a much more advanced stage than me can have gone so long without seeing that point and it not causing major problems in acquiring the language.
ryan
@LaPingvino
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Hablaremos pronto
@Ryan
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No sentences to scrape? Hold on for some weeks, I think you’ll be VERY happy; I’m currently working on a project that should make life waaaaaay easier for the avarage sentence collector
Spanish is my third language after English and French, so these exceptions are no big deal. When I was still learning the more complicated aspects of French grammar, I just accepted that some things would be weird and that I might not understand perfectly at first. With that in mind, I just learned what sounds right, and what looks right. It reminds me of math in junior high and high school. Most of the time I didn’t understand what I was doing with the formulas, I just made sure that I did it right and got the right answer and then later on understanding would come. ;] The same thing happened with agua. When I first learned the word, I was told that it was feminine…but masculine in the singular…huh, makes no sense, right? So I just memorized that and later learned that it’s always feminine, it just takes the masculine article for pronunciation ease (a similar thing happens in French – in front of vowels, le and la become l’). Hambre is another word that does the same thing. ‘El hambre’, but ‘tengo mucha hambre.’ French actually does this type of thing a lot- to avoid two vowel sounds together. Ok, so I think the point of my long-winded comment is that learning exceptions doesn’t have to be a pain in the neck but instead it can be like a riddle or a treasure map. :] You don’t understand (riddle) at first or you feel lost (map) but after working your way through it, you have something special and a better understanding.
again, sorry for the long comment. XD
PS your sentence project sounds sweet.
It’s an interesting observation, but it has very logical reasoning behind it
I’ll expand on Jill’s tweet:
“agua” should always be considered as feminine. This is important not so much for plurals but for the use of adjectives. So it’s el agua fría (NOT frío) etc. as Jill said.
Agua is not an exception to be learned, but actually follows a logical rule: The only reason it gets the masculine article is because of a general rule for ALL words that begin with a STRESSED “a”. This means that all two syllable words starting with “a” (or “ha”) must have the masculine article if used immediately before; el agua, el hambre, el alma and you can even extend it to further syllables if the ‘a’ is accented: el águila (the eagle). All of these are actually feminine words.
It’s because of pronunciation; if we were to say la + stressed a, it would merge the two ‘a’s together and you would have something sound like lagua, lambre etc. This doesn’t happen with words like la abella; even if some speakers merge the two ‘a’s together, the stress on the syllable changes how this works.
This also means that if you were to use an adjective BEFORE the noun then it is not el any more.
So you could say something like “LA gran hambre” (the great hunger), BUT “EL hambre grande” (the big hunger).