ABSTRACT
Grammars would describe nouns as words describing people or things, but there are many examples that go beyond this: abstract concepts such as 'love' and 'hate', actions such as 'slap' and 'run', and more. In Catalan all nouns are marked for grammatical gender, as opposed to English, which only has natural gender. This means that all nouns in Catalan are either masculine or feminine, and this might have nothing to do with the gender of what they refer to (and so persona (person) is always feminine whether it refers to a man or a woman, and jovent (youth) is always masculine whether it refers to boys, girls, or a mix of both). The function of adjectives in Catalan does not differ from their function in English; they indicate some kind of quality or feature of a noun. The meaning of adjectives can be accentuated or mellowed by means of a preceding adverb, as in English 'very'.
