Re: Gender of rivers - and other waters.

Quoting Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>:

> On 03/10/2008, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
> > It struck me that the Suraetuan rivers all have masculine endings, and I
> > guess the Suraetuans must think of their waters as a kind of semen that
> > fertilises the Earth. Maybe you people who have such wide repertoires of
> > languages can tell me how common this is? Of course, many languages don't
> > have a gender system. Of the languages I know anything about, at least
> > German has a masculine word for river, but the majority of the others seem
> > to be feminine. How are you dealing with this in your conlangs?
>
> It's true that "der Fluss", "der Bach", and "der Strom" are all
> masculine, but when you look at individual names, you have a rule of
> thumb that really big rivers are masculine (der Nil, der Amazonas, der
> Mississippi, der Rio Grande, der Rhein) but smaller rivers and streams
> are feminine (die Elbe, die Bille, die Weser).
>
> There's no hard cut-off (e.g. die Donau, even though the Danube is
> pretty long), but it's fairly robust.
>
> So on the whole, river *names* are feminine.
Interesting. The rule of thumb we were taught in German class was that German
rivers are feminine with a few exceptions (eg. der Rhein, der Main) while
foreign rivers are masculine unless they end in -a or -e (der Nil, die Wolga).

--
Andreas Johansson

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