I was out on the verandah talking on the phone when I saw a tiny lizard. “Ooh, ¡qué lindo!, ¡un lagartijo pequeñísimo!” I exclaimed, or something equally inane.
The friend I was speaking to was quick to reply, “But clearly not that small, or you wouldn’t know that it was male!”
He was, of course, making fun of my Spanish and the fact that I’d got the gender wrong.
It seems that although there are lagartos (defined by the Real Academia Española as “Reptil terrestre del orden de los Saurios, de cinco a ocho decímetros de largo […]“) and lagartas (“Hembra del lagarto“), all the little ones are lagartijas (“Especie de lagarto muy común en España, de unos dos decímetros de largo […]“).
I’ve been a bit out of contact with Spanish recently, as I was travelling in the UK and I’ve been very wrapped up in translations which require more focus on the English product than on the Spanish of the original. It’s amazing how quickly you can forget details of a language.
The worst two problems I seem to be having are both to do with word endings: the verb suffixes that show who’s doing the action and when it’s being done, and the noun and adjective endings that tend to indicate gender.
In English, word endings are usually superfluous. Verb inflections – both for person and tense – are very limited and we tend to rely on other contextual clues for the missing information. There’s hardly any gender distinction, except in the now less commonly used pairs like actor/actress and policeman/policewoman. Often, when we do use gender-specific words they are totally different – cow/bull, tom/queen etc – which gives rise to little misunderstanding.
Which is probably why it’s so easy for an angloparlante to produce sentences without agreement and commit dreadful acts of “violencia de género” in the Spanish language.
don't confuse the narrator 