Hi! I had a question about the ending of some adjectives. When I was studying abroad in Spain I noticed my host mom refer to cold water as “agua fría” which kind of confused me since agua is a masculine noun- is it because it sounds better/flows better and are there any other examples of where this happens?

Okay, so agua is TECHNICALLY feminine. It takes the masculine el to keep you from swallowing the A sounds… la + agua would sound like “lagua”

French and Italian have similar concepts, though they normally use apostrophes, or they change something depending on a certain letter/phoneme

It’s similar to how English says “a” or “an” depending on if a word starts with a strong vowel sound or not.

Going more in depth, allow me to copy/paste from a separate ask: 

The rules for this type of noun are as follows:

Btw, these are not rules that are ever really stated except for when you see el agua or something and then the dictionary usually says (f) or something right near it so you know it’s feminine. They’re just things native speakers know based on what sounds right.

Linguistically, this is something that’s done to create something like a “hiatus” [I don’t know if that’s the correct term for this, but a “hiatus” is a vocal stop/obstacle that makes you fully enunciate all the vowels in a word]

In other words if you had agua which means “water” as “la agua”, the two A’s would run together into one sound. This might sound arbitrary to us, but it impacts Spanish poetry quite a bit. In English “la agua” for example is 3 syllables “la-a-gua”. In Spanish, it would be 2 syllables “laa-gua”.

In Spanish, the same vowel or vowel sounds put together tend to bleed together. If you say something like va a ayudar “he/she is going to help” it is “vaaa-yu-dar” for Spanish counting as 3 syllables here.

The break up of sounds with the addition of a masculine article is done for the sake of pronunciation so the words don’t blend together.

Italian has this same issue except they correct it with an apostrophe, and just allow the sounds to sort of blend so you get “l’acqua”… in pronunciation it runs together, in orthography [writing it out] the L and the apostrophe help mark it as a definite article.

To talk more about this I’ll go over each of the things because it makes more sense in context.

1 - 3: The word must begin with A- or HA-, be feminine, and have the emphasis on the first syllable.

The following words are the most common nouns that follow this example are:

And all of these are feminine, and have their stress on the first syllable.

Consider a word like el árbol which begins in A- and has its stress on the first syllable. It’s also masculine, so it’s el árbol, los árboles. The same problem exists with el álamo “poplar tree”.

Then you have a word like la ayuda “help” which begins in A- and is feminine, but its stressed syllable is the second one [the “yu”] which makes it take the word feminine instead.

The best examples of this duality are:

While el ánimo and el hado fit two big requirements [beginning with A- or HA-, and having the stressed syllable be the first one], they are both masculine so it doesn’t count.

But el ánima and el hada are both feminine so they fit the bill.

4. They’re “masculine” with the article, but have feminine qualities

This is an important grammatical point to make. Though they have masculine articles, that’s only done for pronunciation and spelling. Their grammatical gender is still feminine, so all the adjectives put on them are feminine:

5. Another grammatical distinction is that these apply to el, un, algún, or ningún but as stated before, they’re still feminine technically:

*these are all for the sake of example

6. In plural, they’re all distinctly feminine with feminine articles

*There’s (generally) no plural of ningún, ninguno, ninguna. It’s inherently singular since it more literally means “not one”… like no hay ninguna silla is “there are no chairs” in English but literally reads as “there is not a single chair”

7. The article/determiner MUST be right in front of the noun for it to appear as masculine in singular.

Because this is all done for preserving the A- or HA- sound, the rules no longer apply when a word breaks up the article/determiner and the noun. Usually what breaks up the words is an adjective, or an adverb + adjective combo.

This is typically more dramatic [since most of the time adjectives go behind nouns in Spanish, so putting it in front is SUPER dramatic]… or it’s one of the adjectives that sort of changes meaning depending on its placement like viejo/a, mismo/a, gran/grande, antiguo/a etc.

When these show up, you get a feminine article/determiner and feminine adjectives:

When you’ve got the article/determiner + the noun, you need the masculine article to create that “hiatus”

When you’ve got the article/determiner + adjective + noun, the adjective already breaks them up and creates its own kind of hiatus. 

The problem isn’t the noun itself, so you can have la buena hada… the problem is that Spanish decided they wanted to preserve the sound of the article/determiner by switching it to masculine and creating that stop with the L

hello, I was wondering if you knew when the full idol room ep was going to be out? Or if it already is where can I watch it? Thank you.(also your dedication for giving us this content is incredible)

hello! i was able to find the full episode here, but it’s not subbed 🙇‍♀️

- admin k