Hey it’s Professor Dave, let’s see how Italian uses gender.
The idea that words can have genders, just like people, tends to be very confusing for
those who only speak English, because this concept just doesn’t exist in the English
language.
An apple is not a boy or a girl.
It’s an apple.
The same goes for tables, chairs, spoons, and forks.
Nevertheless, in Italian, an apple is female, and a tomato is male, so a good grasp of this
concept is absolutely essential to learning the Italian language.
It’s not just for nouns, either.
Italian adjectives and articles vary according to gender as well.
Some forms of verbs need to agree with the gender of a noun, and so forth.
We must understand that Italian, just like the other Romance languages, is derived from
Latin, which had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Luckily, with Italian things were simplified a bit, and neuter does not exist, only masculine
and feminine.
Far from any philosophical thinking, it is just the ending of the word’s dictionary
form that determines its gender.
If it ends in O, it’s masculine, like gelato.
If it ends in A, it’s feminine, like pizza.
So this is a general pattern that can be employed reliably.
As one would expect, words like vino, biglietto, and espresso, are masculine.
Words like chiesa, sedia, and penna, are feminine.
Unfortunately, there are some exceptions.
Some words that end in A are masculine, like problema, programma, or sistema, accented
words like babà, and also some animals, like gorilla, panda, koala.
Some words that end in O are feminine, like mano, or radio.
If a word ends in E, it’s also tricky, and we have to learn these on a case-by-case basis.
Ristorante is masculine, while televisione is feminine.
The gender of these words can be learned over time through usage, or one can consult the
dictionary, which will have the gender listed.
More masculine nouns include bicchiere, nome, mare, and pane.
Feminine nouns include nave, notte, stazione, and carne.
Why are boats and nighttime female, while bread and the sea are male?
Perhaps it’s just because Italians are such romantic folks.
But since we now understand that nouns have gender, let’s move forward and learn about
what happens when we pluralize them.