Re: Gender of rivers - and other waters.

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.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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