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Originally Posted by laepelba
Actually, with the limited number of nouns I've encountered thus far, it's actually quite easy to figure out which are masculine and which are feminine.
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Roughly speaking nouns which are masculine and feminine in Latin (many of which ended in -a if feminine and in -us if masculine; -us has become -o in Spanish) have retained their gender, but nouns which were neuter are pretty arbitrary. Some of them have even changed over the history of Spanish (el mar used to be la mar, and still is in Ecuador: nice and logical
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Quote:
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What are the changes in vowels that you mention?
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o -> ue, e -> ie, e -> i, etc.
E.g. m
olar (adj) with cognate noun m
uela, from Latin molaris. However, had the Latin been mōlaris it would be m
ola in Spanish: the vowel wouldn't change when it got the stress. In essence, Latin short and long vowels (which sounded different and were written differently in Latin) are pronounced and spelt the same in Spanish but behave differently with stress.