From the mailbox (lightly edited, links added):
Hey, love learning from your words everyday. .... Quick question — is asma feminine or masculine? You have as la palabra "el asma" but you also have as an aviso that asma is feminine.
You've got it right — asma is feminine, but Spanish speakers do say el asma. Asma, meaning "asthma," is one of those nouns that begin with a stressed a sound and thus use the masculine definite article el in the singular form. That grammatical rule is explained in the lesson on using el with certain feminine nouns.
I must confess, though, that I had to think for a few seconds when I saw your question. That's because there are many Spanish nouns that end in -ma that are masculine. They're all of Greek origin and almost always have an English cognate. They include words such as diploma (diploma), drama (drama), poema (poem) and tema (theme). Asma too is of Greek origin and has an English cognate; why it didn't follow the pattern of other Greek -ma words I haven't been able to find out. Possibly it's because, unlike many of the other words, it didn't come to Spanish directly through Latin (according to Dicciomed.es), but came via French with a partial change in meaning from the Greek.
Comments
The reason that it is ‘el asma’ and ‘las asmas’, it the same as for ‘el agua’ and ‘las aguas’.
As the language transformed from Vulgate Latin into modern Spanish, the article ‘ela’, for ‘the’, existed among the mainly uneducated soldier and sailor Latin immigrants into Spain.
Even though there is no written accent on the beginning ‘a’ on either word, the natural stress, on the penultimate syllable still carries through.
And of course, as most people do, the tendency to take the easiest way to do or say something, people began to say “el agua” and “el asma” because it is much easier than to say, ‘la’ followed by the stressed initial ‘a’ in either ‘agua’ or ‘asma’.
(Note: This lesson was taught to me in my graduate studies in Spanish, where I took a course in the derivation of Modern Spanish from Vulgate Latin, many years ago, so I can’t really take credit, except for remembering it for so many years.)
I’ve been teaching Spanish since 1976, and I still love it!