Re: Semantic Content of Grammatical Gender?
| From: | David McCann <david@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, February 2, 2009, 9:33 |
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On Sun, 2009-02-01 at 11:32 -0000, caeruleancentaur wrote:
> A few others have come to mind. (BTW I'm talking about Spanish.)
>
> la policia = the police
> el policia = the policeman
French has a couple of dozen like that:
la pendule 'clock', le pendule 'pendulum'
la critique 'criticism', le critique 'critic'
la trompette 'trumpet', le trompette 'trumpeter'
la manche 'sleeve', le manche 'handle'
la livre 'pound', le livre 'book'
Obviously the loss of final syllables has helped by creating homophones
of unrelated words, as in the last case.
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