Re: What's a gender?

All this happens in Romaninan, which is the perfect
example. At least according to one of those online
courses I've been browsing at lately... :) But I
suppose they can't be wrong about that.

In Romanian, neuter nouns behave like masculines in
the singular, but as feminines in the plural.

Just that simple!

Salu2,
Santiago

--- Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> escribió:

> Hallo!
>
> On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:00:56 +0100, Lars Finsen
> wrote:
>
> > Den 29. des. 2006 kl. 13.31 skrev Mark Reed:
> >
> > > Italian is notable for its number of m sg -> f
> pl nouns, to be sure,
> > > but Spanish and other romlangs also exhibit the
> phenomenon.  I believe
> > > the nouns in question all (or at least mostly)
> derive from Latin
> > > neuters, which resemble masculine nouns in the
> singular and feminine
> > > (singular) nouns in the plural.
> >
> > They do the same in Norwegian, actually, unlike
> Swedish and Danish.
> > An old IE heritage, I guess.
>
> I didn't know that this happened somewhere else than
> in Romance.  But the
> seeds of this phenomenon were indeed already laid in
> PIE.  Feminines were
> derived from masculines by the suffix *-h2, which
> suffixed to a thematic
> stem yielded *-eh2 > *-a:.  Now the neuter plural
> was a homophonic *-eh2
> > *-a: - hardly surprising that these two endings
> got confounded in some
> IE languages.
>
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
>

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