Lesson 2.2 - Nouns

In the first part we talked about nouns, who are generally classified by common nouns and/or proper nouns. Now we speak about the gender. The gender of the nouns can be masculine or feminine. For the animate things the gender usually corresponds to the sex (picciriddu (boy) / picciridda (girl), (j)attu (male cat) / (j)atta (female cat)), on the other hand for the inanimate things, the gender is an agreement and it doesn't correspond to a real situation (lettu (bed), libbru (book) / biciretta (bike), seggia (chair)).

Usually nouns end with -a when they are feminine, with -u or -i when they are masculine; they usually end with -i when they are plural. So, sometimes nouns can end differently. If a noun ends with -i and we don't know if it's singular or plural, the article helps us to understand it. 

Gender in inanimate things

Mobile nouns

They are nouns who turn masculine or feminine changing the final part of the word:

maistru (male teacher) / maistra (female teacher), liuni (male lion) / liunissa (female lion).

Indipendent nouns

They are nouns who make the masculine and the feminine with two different roots:

masculu (male) / fimmina (female), frati (brother) / soru (sister), maritu (husband) / muggheri (wife), patri (father) / matri (mother), jennaru (son-in-law) / nora (daughter-in-law).

Nouns with common gender

They have just one form used for both masculine and feminine:

niputi (grandchild), musicista (musician), pidiatra (pediatrician).

Nouns with promiscuous gender

Some animal nouns have just on form for both the male animal and the female animal:

'a vurpi (the fox), l'aquila (the eagle), 'a zebbra (the zebra), 'a carcarazza (the crow).

If you want to specify, you've got to add the adjective masculu or fimmina:

'a vurpi masculu (the male fox), 'a vurpi fimmina (the female fox).

False change of gender

Some words look like they are the male or the female version of the same word, but they are different words. This phenomenon is known as false change of gender.

Words with different roots

They don't relate each other:

arcu (bow) / arca (coffer), coddu (neck) / codda (glue), tassu (badger) / tassa (tax).

Words with the same root

They once were the masculine and feminine form of the same word, but through the ages the masculine got a different meaning than the feminine.

Homographic nouns

The nouns who are written in the same way but they have different meanings.

S.

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