Buenos días, amigas.  At least, it is morning as I’m creating this post. In the spirit of The Truman Show, though, buenas tardes, buenas noches,  y buenas noches. (In case I don’t see ya.) If you’re familiar with my tendency to post vídeos de la música each Wednesday, you know how much I love listening to (and sometimes attempting to translate) Latina pop.  In many of those songs, I come across the adjectives este, esta, y esto, as well as ese, esa, y eso.  In each case, I kept noticing their being translated as “this” and “that”, resp.  And I kept wondering why!

Gender games revisited

As we’ve discussed in some past posts, el idioma del español assigns gender to each noun, and, thus, the adjectives that modify said nouns and the pronouns that replace them.  This is a little odd for native English speakers, inasmuch as our language uses no such construct.  I.e., we assign no gender to any nouns but proper names.  Evidently, there are some cases in español where gender is uncertain, as well.  In those cases, we break out esto and eso.

In Rocket Spanish’s Lección 4.5, I learned that the adjectives esto and eso are used to ask questions about something when the gender is unknown.  The questions “What is this?” (¿Qué es esto?) and “What is that?” (¿Qué es eso?) usually mean that the asker isn’t sure what she/he is asking about; right?  Thus, how can the person know what gender to assign to it when asking in a gender-sensitive language like Español?  That’s where these gender-neutral pronouns come into play.  Brilliant!  If one does know the gender of the noun referred to, however, the proper forms are esta/esa for referring to feminine nouns and este/ese for masculine.

 Más sobre ésto

If one does know the gender of the noun referred to, the proper forms are esta/esa for referring to feminine nouns and este/ese for masculine.  (This is true whether these words are being used as pronouns, too, by the way, the difference being that the first syllable is accented  in the case of the pronoun — e.g., ésa instead of esa.)

There are, of course, also considerations of number.  And this is where it gets confusing for your hermano.  Well, at least it does where the masculine forms are concerned.  Why?  Take a look at the following list, loosely derived from my textbook:

• Here
  • esta (this, feminine)
  • este (this, masculine)
  • estas (these, feminine)
  • estos (these, masculine)
• There
  • esa (that, feminine)
  • ese (that, masculine)
  • esas (those, feminine)
  • esos (those, masculine)

Okay, so does anyone else see something confusing about all of this?  What’s strange to me is that the plural form of ese is esos, while eso stands on its own as a gender-indeterminate adjective.

I cannot help but wonder why eso and esos are not paired up as singular and plural forms of “that”, while ese would be left to describe items of unknown gender.  Seems inconsistent to me.  Then again, I suppose it is consistent with the convention of los being the plural form of el when it comes to the article adjective “the”, so it remains just another fact I’ll have to commit to memory and just move on.  (If my memory were better, that wouldn’t be so troublesome.)

Bueno, querida lectoras, I guess that’s all I have to write about that (sobre esa) for this week.  I need to hop on the stationary bike for a while and work on my other goal — getting in the best physical shape of my life before my early 50s are concluded.  And then I need to get another Spanish lesson knocked out, either today or tomorrow.  Much to do these days.

¡Hasta luego, amigas!