Well, *manus *in Latin is feminine.
Moderator Note
Me no habla, but whatever it is, it was raised by a spammer who has since been wished away to the cornfield.
El zombi.
I guess if it’s a female zombie, you could call it “la zombi”.
The discrepancy is a result from the fact that the genders of words were originally grammatical and not sexual. That is, there was a set of words that used these endings, and another set of words that used those endings. Only later were the genders associated with the biological sexes.
We’d have saved ourselves a lot of headaches if we’d decided to describe genders in IE languages with types A,B,C as necessary rather than masculine/feminine (and neuter).
Nauta, sailor, was the only other one I was taught, although I am going back 64 years. And yes, I think manus was a 4th declension feminine. French main is also feminine (although genders can and do change, so that is not an invariable rule; cf. la cuenta and le compte).
Not the same thing, but related I think:
I once read that the old language(s) that modern European languages descend from have very extensive grammar systems, think German and then some, but over time all the difficult conjugations tended to get lost, especially when languages interacted with (speakers of) other languages. (For instance, I once heard Afrikaans described as a “kiddy language”, and I can’t deny it sounds as such to us Dutch people, who can understand about 85% of it. Dutch has lost only a few conjugations the past century or two, Afrikaans pretty much all of them.)
Anyway, if it’s true that languages originally had such complex grammar systems, where did those come from??
How big a fool would I look if I were to confuse the masculine and feminine articles - for example, said “el mano” in casual conversation?
Not a fool, just not a native or otherwise fully fluent speaker. (Even fully fluent speakers make mistakes sometimes, but not with a word as common as “mano”).
I remember a native speaker using the wrong imperfect form for a verb once (“-iba” in place of “-ía”), and his sister laughed, and he sheepishly said, “oops.” So mistakes like this do happen, of course…but they indeed come across as mistakes.
More the fool if you change the ending as well.
I had a spanish roommate, and I was trying to practice my spanish, and suggested we get “la polla” for dinner. He about fell over laughing. He said I had meant to say “el pollo” for chicken (it helped that we were at the grocery store and I was pointing) and not “la polla”, which is a rude term for male genitalia. Why the male genetalia would have the feminine ending, I cannot explain (well, except for Pleonast’s post) .
Of course, he could have just been messing with me.
Then there’s Russian, with * muzhchina * for “man.” And Nikita Khrushchev.
Although pene (penis) is masculine, another common term, verga, is feminine. Coño, a vulgar term for the feminine genitalia, is masculine.
This just emphasizes that in grammatical gender it’s the words that are “masculine” or “feminine,” not the things that the words refer to.
And then there’s el mar and la mar …
My favorite is la papa (the potato) and el papa (the Pope).
Well, grammars can be complex in very different ways and often simplicity in one area is balanced by complexity in another although what it means for something to be complex is relatively subjective. As far as case systems go, my understanding is that they’re usually formed by a postposition (that is to say, a preposition that comes after the word it’s modifying) becoming ‘stuck’ to the word. In the past, I believe the conventional wisdom is that as languages began to ‘rub shoulders’ more and more, it was likely that a language would drop its tricky bits which included things like noun cases and complex conjugations but that is sometimes thought to be euro- or IE-centric. I think the currently popular theory is that this sort of language change moves in cycles. The forebears of ‘western’ languages were case-heavy so we’re moving slowly towards isolating languages, but if we were to be living somewhere where the proto language was very isolating, we’d see movement towards cases.
Then there are those seemingly inexplicable in any sense.
I bought a house in El Palacés.
So far, noone has been able to clarify.
That particular name is a play on words. The dick is the young hen (polla) that sits on top of a guy’s huevos, eggs (what you call balls).
If you’re ever offered huevos de polla it’s neither a bad word nor testicles, it’s eggs laid by young hens: they get sold separately because they are more likely than those of mature hens to have two yolks or no yolk (I got a three-yolker once).
What´s wrong with “el Palacés”? Looks like a derivation of palacio, palace, which is (m). Are you thinking that because it ends in -s it has to be plural?
Per JRRT, Bilbo was actually named “Bilba” because in Westron, the ‘a’ ending was masculine. Or something similar, anyway.
Apropos of nothing, Frodo was really called ‘Maura’ and Sam was ‘Banazir’.
One of the things I learned in the first week of high school Latin was that “farmer” and “pirate” were both feminine nouns. Agricola et pirata.
To add to the confusion, “Manos” is masculine and singular, yet is parsed plural, when personified as an attribute of “Fate.”