“Radio” as a means of communication is masculine in some countries (mexico, iirc) and feminine in others.
“Radio” is always going to be tricky since it can abbreviate radio-telephone (telephone is itself tricky), radio-telegraphy, and more. I do not even see why it would be masculine or feminine; an even mix across languages of masculine, neuter, and feminine would be expected. It is obviously inanimate, though, where that is a gender (or is it?)
Cf “laser” as a benchmark made-up word in most languages — mostly (but not always) masculine
It certainly moves and does things.
It’s not German or Spanish. It’s Nemoan.
In French, as far as I can tell, common usage decides. And usually, common usage is based on what the word sounds like. If it sounds like words that are feminine (for instance it ends with a sound that is typical of feminine words), it ends up with a feminine gender. And the other way around. People generally have a good feeling of what a new word “gender” "should be. It doesn’t “sounds right” if the “wrong” gender is used.
There’s no neuter in French.
German, among other languages, has masculine, feminine, and neuter. But it is only weakly connected to whether a word represents a living thing or not. For example, young girl, Madchen, is neuter, while bridge, Brucke, is feminine.
Yes, German has masculine/feminine/neuter, but I was wondering what gender “radio” (the receiver and/or the waves) takes in the various languages where the genders are animate vs inanimate. I hope someone will tell us as I do not have the relevant dictionaries handy.
Same q for “laser”. And other major language families if we are feeling ambitious (Dravidian? Australian? Bantu?)
In Spanish, radio is both f and m, for different meanings. Communications: f. Geometry and physics: m. El radio del círculo (the radius of the circle); el radio es un elemento radiactivo (radium is a radioactive element); baja la radio (lower the volume on the radio).
Catalan has radi (m) where English has radium or radius and radio (f) where English has radio.
Both treat láser/làser as (m).
sigh sorry to bump this, but I remembered that Latin does have nouns that can be treated as either gender without changing its forms. Example: a female soldier would be bona miles, while a male soldier would be bonus miles. Similarly bonus accola, bona accola. But agricola (always masculine) is not in this class!
Of course Latin is not the only language that does this.
Why the weirdness? There must be some explanation, but ultimately gender is weird.
Thanks for all the replies.
It depends. For example, as far as I can tell “job” is typically masculine in European dialects of French, and feminine in Canadian dialects of French. There’s really no reason why it should be either, but that’s what usage decided.
Interestingly, “gang” in my dialect of French is masculine when referring to criminal groups, but feminine when referring to groups of friends. I think Canadian dialects of French tend to give the feminine gender to new words more commonly than European ones.
I guess the problem is the word, and making an unusual situation (female soldier) fit the context.
Kind of reminds me of the cartoon about the two guys watching TV.
“Look - a black Frenchman!”
“Black is inappropriate.”
“So what do I call him?”
“African-American is the proper term.”
“But he’s French. African-American-Frenchman?”
“Hmmm… that’s not right either…”
Sometimes the right words don’t fit.
And the cartoon was funnier 25 years ago before all the immigrant problems in Europe.
Let’s continue the Latin example; I suspect much of this applies to non-Indo-European languages as well.
You may (or may not - I don’t know) be right that some occupational nouns (like nauta) are masculine because they were historically male. Significantly, that proves that gender is not purely a function of the declension or termination. So some nouns will “sound feminine” or “sound neuter”, while other times classification wins out (rivers and mountains are usually masculine; trees and gems are usually feminine), nor are these independent factors.
We also saw that for newly coined words speakers, being immersed in the internal logic of the language, usually have a consistent gut feeling about what the gender should be. (Except when this fails: perhaps French job is masculine like
emploi, and Canadian job is feminine like profession?) Latin also has a few words like anguis with no definite gender.
No matter what happened thousands of years ago, there are too many exceptions and by now we have fallen deep into the grammatical rabbit hole. Back to Latin, miles can be female, but agricola definitely cannot. So what if some farmer really is female and we have to talk about her? The only way is to employ a circumlocution like agricola femina. Now I need help from native speakers, though; is bona agricola femina then correct? Cf bona hippopotamus femina ??
Yeah, it could be that there is a different word for a female farmer, or even different ones depending on specific tasks*, or if the word agricola implies ownership of a farm then considering that Roman Law didn’t consider women capable of owning property then it wouldn’t apply. Lots of possible explanations but go and find out which is the right one.
- For example, many Spanish-speaking areas used to have espigadoras and segadores working together but on different tasks. The women did the detailed picking (espiga = blade of cereal; by extension, an espigadora is someone who harvests individual items), walking after the men who were doing the big-scale reaping (segar = to reap).
I don’t think anyone here is that old!