Pretty good discussion here – http://www.foundalis.com/res/gender_evolution.html
No they are not. They are first declension, whose words are typically feminine, but the words themselves are masculine: nauta bonus, “good sailor,” NOT **nauta bona. Cite: Perseus. In other words, they follow the pattern of a typically feminine declension, but are not feminine nouns. Now, if you had a woman whose profession was sailor, I assume she would also be a nauta, and I think in that case she would take the feminine adjectives, because she is animate.
In what language, because in Spanish I can think of names for both in both grammatical genders…
Yes, and this affects on how people perceive things:
As an aside, in German language, the gender determines the type:
der See (the male) is the lake (inland)
die See (the female) is the sea.
Das Meer (the neutral) is the sea, from the same latin word mare.
The mixup with inland lake and sea being the same word apparently comes from import from the Dutch language. And in the north German dialect, things are more mixed up, with lakes being called Meer and seas like North Sea being called See.
… what I’d like to know is how… oh God, those guys translated colgante as hung? It means hanging! And I promise over any book of your choice that, unlike the English word they chose, it has no sexual connotations.
Talk about letting your prejudices shape your language.
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While Twain’s quip is funny, the reason that “Mädchen” is neuter, is the diminutive “-chen”. If I remember correctly from my single year of German classes in high school, the “-chen” always forces neutral gender to the word it attaches itself to.
Yep, it seems as if I remember correctly (this time at least…)
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I think it’s more because Cracked is a humor site (although with links to real research) and hung just cries out for a double-entendre in English.
Yeah but it’s still a distortion of the original meaning.
La mar? Hedley or Hetty?
I’m referring to the modern formal classification of words by gender and the labelling of the gender as masculine/feminine. While Proto-IndoEuropean may have been more consistent in grouping nouns as male/female/neither -related, the modern classification labels are pretty arbitrary.
Why would poet be an exclusively male occupation?
Aside from that, isn’t the etymology of barista similar? When I first heard the word I thought it was based on a supposition that baristas were predominantly female, though that clearly wasn’t actually the case.
Never mind, I misread that as Italian.
Neither. It’s Hedy Lamarr.