What is grammatical gender?
如何理解葡萄牙語法上的性？
Every Portuguese noun falls into one of two grammatical categories, called masculine and feminine. The categories are so called because nearly all nouns denoting male beings are masculine, and nearly all nouns denoting female beings are feminine. But all other nouns – those denoting inanimate objects, abstract concepts, etc. – also belong to one of these categories, so, for example, carro ‘car’, calor ‘heat’ and restante ‘remainder’ are all masculine, while mesa ‘table’, idade ‘age’ and decisão ‘decision’ are all feminine.
任何一個葡萄牙語名詞都被歸類于語法上的兩個類別的其中一個，他們是陽性和陰性。之所以被這樣分類，是因?yàn)樗兄甘緸樾坌缘拿~都被都是陽性的，而所有指示為雌性的名詞都是陰性的。但是其他的名詞，那些指示為無生命的物體，例如抽象概念等，都被劃分陽性和陰性的分類。例如，carro ‘car’‘卡車’ calor ‘heat’‘熱’和restante ‘remainder’‘提示’都是陽性的，而mesa ‘table’‘表格’, idade ‘age’ ‘年齡’and decisão ‘decision’ ‘決定’ 都是陰性的。
Except in the case of nouns denoting living beings, there are no semantic clues to the gender of a particular noun. You simply have to memorize the gender of each new noun you learn, but this task is made considerably easier by the fact that certain endings are indicative of a particular gender
除非這個名詞表明一種生物，否則我們基本上沒有語義上的線索去判斷這個名詞的性。你必須去記憶每一個你新學(xué)的名詞的性，但是也這個相當(dāng)簡單的，因?yàn)槟憧梢匀ネㄟ^這個名詞的結(jié)尾去判斷。
Grammatical gender is crucial in Portuguese because articles, adjectives, possessives,demonstratives and pronouns have to agree in gender with the noun they are accompanying or replacing, which in most cases means their form or ending changes according to whether the noun is masculine or feminine.
語法上的性別在葡萄牙語里面是相當(dāng)重要的概念，因?yàn)楣谠~，所有格，指示代詞和代詞必須和這個名詞在性上取得一致，詞尾作出相對應(yīng)的修改。
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