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Masculine nouns ending in -ma or -ta

Dieser Beitrag erklärt ein wichtiges Thema der spanischen Grammatik (Text auf Englisch).

Many students are confused because they see el problema or el clima, and they don’t understand why these words ending in -a are masculine. The explanation is very simple: when a language borrows forms from another language, in some cases the words drag with them the rules of that language, as an expat who goes to another country takes his culture with him. Would you like an English example? The plural of man is men and not mans (or woman – women, tooth – teeth, foot – feet). Why? Because they come from an old language called Proto-Germanic.

Evolution of the problem (pun intended)

In Greek, they have masculine, feminine and neuter forms. Yes, it’s more complicated than in Spanish. But in Latin, the system started to change slowly. This shift didn’t happen in a single moment. In Late Latin (also called Vulgar Latin), the neuter gender started to disappear, and most neuter nouns were gradually reclassified as masculine. When Spanish emerged from this stage of Latin, it inherited that grammatical reassignment. So, we inherited these Greek neuter words as masculine: el problema, el tema, el clima, el sistema, el programa, el idioma, etc.

🔍 Be careful, not all the words ending with -ma come from the Greek language! We also have genuine feminine words in Spanish, like la forma, la pluma, la cama, la crema, la rama, la broma, etc.

Notice also that there are some other Greek neuter words ending in -ta, like el planeta, el cometa, etc. But again, words ending in -ta which do not come from Greek are feminine, like la pasta, la costa, la manta, etc.

Example from the episode

Read the full episode here →

Episode 2