Are some Spanish nouns truly grammatical hermaphrodites?

Abstract

Spanish feminine nouns beginning with tonic /a/ are preceded by the definite article el, rather than la, e.g., el agua, el hambre, etc. This el is a diachronic continuation of the Latin feminine demonstrative ĭlla, whose final /a/ merged with the initial tonic /a/ of the nouns concerned, e.g., ĭlla aqua > ela agua > el agua. Thus, from a historical perspective, this el is feminine, and has therefore been known in the scholarly literature as the “feminine el”. However, given that most native speakers of Spanish are unfamiliar with the history of their language, they misinterpret this el to be the masculine definite article used in this context to avoid a perceived cacophonous sequence of two identical vowels. This erroneous reinterpretation of feminine el as masculine has led many speakers to use other masculine modifiers before these feminine nouns, e.g., este agua, poco agua, todo el agua, etc. This use of other masculine modifiers before these nouns has led some scholars to reclassify them as “hermaphroditic”, i.e., half masculine, half feminine, since masculine modifiers can appear before, but only feminine modifiers after. The present study introduces a syntactic criterion, previously overlooked, which intends to resolve the issue.