Except they also use Heimat (feminine) and Heimatland (neuter) for “homeland.”
Well, the French apparently say “la mère Patrie” which appears to man (at least taking etymology into account) the mother fatherland.
“La mère Patrie” is usually translated into English as “the motherland”. It’s la Patrie imaged as a mother-figure.
Which highlights the point, I think, that nothwithstanding its etymology la Patrie to a French-speaker does not evoke images of a father-figure or of fatherhood. Think of the English words “patriot”, “patrimony”, “patrician”, etc; they all ultimately come from pater, but fatherhood is not what leaps to your mind when you hear them. I think the same is true for la Patrie in French.
When I posted about “masculine”, “feminine”, and “neuter” countries I was only joking! Surely countries don’t have genders… Please don’t take it seriously.
(I’m not directing this at **JRDelirious **in particular–I quoted from his/her post because it sort of summed up the whole sidetrack).
Not fatherland, if you include the madre we get la madre patria - lit motherland. Note that as pointed out by others already the root pat- can refer to the father or to the parents or to tutors: the patria potestad/patria potestas wasn’t the sole domain of the paterfamilias even back in Roman times.
They do in German.
and in Spanish I can think of: Los Estados Unidos - masculine, la Unión Sovietica - feminine. El Reino Unido - masculine. La Santa Sede ( The Vatican) feminine, La Republica Checa - feminine, etc.
Yes, fatherland. That is exactly what patria means.
If my aunt had balls we’d be talking about my uncle wouldn’t we?
That is something else. “Madre patria” is used to refer to a mother country in relation to its colonies or excolonies, not to an individual’s homeland. Spain is “la madre patria” to Spanish-American countries. Spain is the motherland of the American fatherlands.
Ah, the “masculine includes the feminine rule” which drives feminists crazy. It may include the feminine but the meaning of pater is father and not mother which is mater. In Spanish we say “mis padres”, for both parents even if one of them does not have balls. But that does not detract from the fact that the primary meaning is father. I guess you could say “padre” can mean “mother” under certain circumstances but not really, only by inclusion with a real father with balls and all.
More fun: it’s both la Santa Sede (feminine) and el Vaticano (masculine).
But in Spanish “words have gender, living beings have a sex” (RAE dixit).
In old Spanish proper names of lands / countries used articles. La China, la India, el Perú, la Argentina… The trend is to drop the article.
Ah, if only some of our ignorant ministers could learn this. Domestic violence is “violencia de género”. Really? “Gramatical violence”, that’s what it is. The ignorance is just astounding. And these are the people who govern the country.
And when they don’t use “violencia de género” they use “violencia machista” just so that we all know that men are the bad guys and women are incapable of any violence or anything bad. They are just victims of those bad, bad guys. Language manipulation at its finest.
And we can also still say la República Argentina. It’s just one of those “collocation” things, “this word goes with this word beeeeee-cause.”
The stupid name on that law is what prompted the polite remarks from the Academy and a more-in-his-style article from Pérez-Reverte which was just fucking beautiful. My mother usually thinks he uses too many dirty words but in this case she said he was overly restrained.
I realise you were joking, but I can see that later posters took this seriously. So just in the interest of fighting ignorance, “Deutschland” is neuter (“das Deutschland”), not masculine.
I associate the English word “Fatherland” with right-wing nationalism, authoritarianism and in particular Nazi Germany. Is this association widespread among speakers of languages other than English?
I am thinking of an occasion when a Finnish friend disapproved of an inscription on an monument that referred to “isänmaa” (fatherland), implying that it was a term associated with the authoritarian pre-war and wartime government.
(Incidentally, Finnish has no gender, so the grammatical explanation certainly fails in this case!)
So can we safely say “fatherland” is used when they’re all he-men like the Germans and “motherland” when they’re all girly men like the French? Or is that not correct either?
Like I mentioned, in Spanish it’s a pretty commonplace usage and does not carry the implications. In English has the connotation because it never really developed a father/mother/home-land term (former metropolitan powers are called “mother country”) and became widely published only in the WW2 context.
What term would he prefer instead?
For what it’s worth, in Swedish it’s fäderneslandet, which I would translate as the land of our fathers and fedrelandet/fædrelandet in the other Scandinavian languages, which I think can be interpreted as both Land of our fathers and Fatherland.