Possessive pronouns in English vs. Spanish
Background: my native tongue is Spanish and I live in Spain, but at home we speak in English because my wife is English.
Recently I realised that I always struggle with possessive pronouns in the 3rd person in English (his/her). It just takes me an extra second to figure out which one to use (and I often fail). Today while driving it happened again and my brain made a new connection: I struggle with it because it's the other way around in Spanish!
In English the only gendered possessive pronouns are his/her and the gender refers to the possessor (for example: Did your mom get her piano fixed?). This makes sense since nouns are not gendered in English.
In Spanish, the equivalent to his/her is su, which works independently of gender. But for the pronoun ours, the equivalent is nuestro/nuestra and here the gender refers to the gender of the possession. For example, if I was referring to me and my brother and wanted to say that we miss our mother, in Spanish you'd say: Extrañamos a nuestra madre. The word madre is logically femenine1, so you use the femenine pronoun despite the "possessors" being masculine.
This might seem obvious or irrelevant to you, but for me it explained a subconscious process of my brain I've never considered and I'm really curious if it's gonna "fix" my issue with it in English.
💬 Thoughts? Email me a comment
As logical as tables (mesa) being femenine and forks (tenedor) being masculine, but water (agua) being masculine and nation (nación) being femenine. It's funny that I find it difficult in English when it's really easy to figure out which one to use (you usually know the gender of the person you're talking about), but for English speakers it's harder since you have to learn the genders of all the nouns (usually you can guess, but still).↩