My apologies about that previous link. A quick glance suggested it would be a country-by-country discussion of the gender and pluralization issues. Instead it is a well-informed rant against the adoption in Ireland of EU dictates that euro and cent not change spelling in Irish or English, regardless of usual grammar rules.
Listening to RTE Radio One just now, officialdom seems to have accepted “euro” as its own plural. I can’t speak for the population at large, and I’m skeptical that “39 cent” will go down as easily.
Meanwhile, the gender of most former European currencies is feminine, while that of the Euro is generally masculine. The Sydney Morning Herald discusses this briefly, although they misstate the rule about plurals.
FWIW, Russian has three genders (masculine, feminine and neutral) but no articles–hence, “book on table” not “the book is on the table.” Very economical.
True, but this is a slightly different issue–you’re talking about gendered verbs, and the ability to drop the pronoun. But you’re not addressing the issue that the noun, “store”, for example, is considered masculine in some language, when there’s no inherent maleness or femaleness to such a thing.
I think that once you have gramatical gender, then you have to fit every thing into one of the categories and accept the implications in terms of article agreement and verb agreement.
Hebrew, and many other languages do not have a neutral gender. (Although in Hebrew the male gender is also the default gender when the subject is unknown or when it is simply incorrect to assign one of the sex genders such as with G-d.) So the problem of assigning sex genders to sexless things is just an outcome of having gramatical gender without a neutral gender.
God I just remember getting so fucking confused in the “Wol and the Nightingale” [yes - that was how they spelt “owl” in Anglo Saxon times] with the fact that IIRC “heo” was the pronoun meaning “she”. God I got those damn birds confused.
You’re wrong. It’s the correct word for a female dog, and it’s very commonly used as such. It can be used as an insult with sexual connotations, but it’s not that usual. Actually, it seems to me it’s in english that the word “bitch” is rarely used without derogatory connotation. In french, it’s perfectly OK.
Which brings to mind the case of Cantabrian Spanish. Here’s a list of the deciding characteristics for the assignment of intimates to masculine/feminine categories.
Masc
small
narrow
vertical
tall
phallic
coarse
dark
deprecatory
derived
occasional
Fem
large
wide
horizontal
squat
supine
smooth
light
approbatory
primary
familiar
By way of example: montón = stack of hay-masc, motona = very big stack of hay-fem.
Thought the libidinous content of this system (one can almost hear Freud saying, “TOLD YOU SO!” ) is probably unique, there are a few other languages that have some interesting semantics in thier gender systems.
One that really got me thinking is Tamil. In the grossest sense there is a two-tiered classification system. The top tier distinguishes rational (people, gods, and demons) from non-rational (everything else). Those things in the rational category are further divided by natual sex (male and female). The end result is a gender system that looks like the Russian one described above. But here’s the bit that knocked my socks off. A child, from birth until the age of two(ish) is classified as non-rational. As far as they’re concerned, an infant is no different than good-sized rock.
I always found it odd that of the German words for fork, knife, and spoon, each with a different gender, the masculine one would be spoon and the feminine one would be fork. Go figure.
That’s the problem, though regnad: it’s grammatically incorrect. As we use certain words and phrases more in speech, they tend to show up more in our writing. However, English teachers will never fail to lecture us on missuse of a plural pronoun!
