The Romans invented gender fluid nouns.
Often students are perplexed about nouns that are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. These ‘transgender nouns’ can be blamed on the Romans. Because they had neuter nouns in Latin and these neuter nouns are the roots of the Italian transgender nouns.
Many neuter nouns are from the third declension but some are from other declensions, such as the second or the fourth (my son is studying Latin, grazie Kevin).
Many of these nouns are parts of our body.
As you can see all these nouns are not only masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural but they all finish in a.
The reason for this is because they were neuter in the second or third declensions in Latin and, so, they used to finish with a in the nominative, the accusative and vocative cases (grazie Kevin).
Nowadays, there is still a place in Calabria called ‘Le Castella’. In Italian, it should be i castelli, the castles, but castellum used to be neuter in Latin and the plural castella is the version we are still using, we just added Le to sound really Italian!
