Nava:
In Spanish and in Catalan when something can have both actual genders, you get two different words or at least gendered versions of the same word. Examples from Spanish.
A cat is male until you know otherwise: el gato. Once you know it’s female, it becomes la gata. I’ve seen factory workers take it as personal offence that someone would refer to the resident feral she-cat as “el gato” when that someone knew perfectly well that it was a lady. Strictly speaking you can always say “el gato,” but socially speaking it may be a bad idea.
A big, horned, hairless (unless you’re in Scotland) mammal in a prairie is una vaca… until someone tells you it’s not a vaca, it’s a toro or a buey (or any other of a handful of synonims and of similar words) - but that happens in English too, it’s a cow until you discover it’s a bull.
Russian is about the same. A dog is feminine. But if you have a male dog, you would use a masculine pronoun for him.
Of course you have a problem telling a story about a frog prince since Russian frogs are feminine. You get a frog princess instead.
You’re right–that’s not overly clear. I’m asking about what pronoun to use when a noun has an intrinsic “grammatical” gender that disagrees with the subject’s actual physical gender.
Svejk_1:
Anyway, I think that in many cases where you have animals, you often have a male and a female noun in addition to the generic term, so that might be helpful when sorting out differences.
And this is the thing I wasn’t aware of. In my French classes decades ago, I don’t remember learning separate words for male and female cats–just “le chat.”
Nava:
No, it’s Spanish and done to avoiding a cacophony. Agua is female, aguas is female, but female nouns which start by the letter “a” take masculine articles in the singular because otherwise, in order to differentiate the article from the noun, a speaker would have to pause at an extremely awkward point.
In English, you want to say “feminine,” not “female,” because remember, we’re talking grammatical gender!
Quercus
September 30, 2009, 12:29pm
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Kobal2:
Oh, yes, I forgot : as in constanze ’s German example, were you to refer back to that masculine noun group “un requin femelle” further down the sentence, you’d use the feminine pronoun “elle”, since it refers to a feminine object. Ain’t French fun ?
So if you thought a (female) shark was beautiful you would say something like
Chronos:
Actually, so far as I know, “poeta” (along with “agricola” and “naviga”, the other two masculine first-declension nouns) is always masculine. I’m not sure what an ancient Roman would have called Sappho.
In Spanish, “the poet” is “el poeta” if he’s male, “la poeta” if she’s female. Similarly, “el taxista” (the (male) taxi driver) “la modelo” (the (female) model), and some others. I also know that people say “la chatte” for a female cat in French, though I have heard from a reliable source that ‘la chatte’ can also mean something else entirely! :o
Chronos
September 30, 2009, 6:06pm
26
Yes, but that out isn’t available in Latin, since Latin lacks articles.