Common nouns of two genders

When we study the noun gender at school, we learned that they can be masculine nouns or feminine nouns, right? Well then, this simple and objective explanation overlooks a curious phenomenon in the Portuguese language, the common nouns of two genders.

If it is common to both genders, it means that it does not suffer any kind of alteration, as it can refer to both men and women. Look at the examples of common nouns of two genders:

♂♀The American singer is the idol of the young audience.
♂♀ The American singer is the idol of the young audience.

♂♀THE client was not satisfied with the service.
♂♀O client he was not satisfied with the service.

Did you notice that the words idol and client didn't suffer any kind of morphological change? Their structures remained intact, even naming different genres. What happened was a syntactic modification, that is, some adjustments were made to let you know when the phrase was referring to a man or when it was referring to a woman. The distinction was made thanks to the articles

Oand Theand the determinants, such as singer and singer-The, american-Oand american-The, satisfied-Oand satisfied-The.

Now that you know that not all substantive undergo gender inflection, know a list of common nouns from two genders, and good studies!

• the anarchist - the anarchist

• the agent - the agent

• the artist - the artist

• the comrade - the comrade

• the boss - the boss

• the customer - the customer

• the colleague - the colleague

• the high school – the high school

• the compatriot - the compatriot

• the dentist - the dentist

• the sick - the sick

• the student - the student

• the fan - the fan

• the manager - the manager

• the heretic - the heretic

• the immigrant - the immigrant

• the indigenous – the indigenous

• the interpreter - the interpreter

• the journalist - the journalist

• the young - the young

• the jurist - the jurist

• the martyr - the martyr

• the pianist - the pianist

• the cop - the cop

• the wild - the wild

• the servant - the servant

• the suicidal - the suicidal

• the taxi driver - the taxi driver

By Luana Castro
Graduated in Letters