Re: Gender of rivers - and other waters.

On 05/10/2008, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> 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).
Hm. You may well be right -- if I think of a random "foreign" proper
name, I'd probably select masculine gender (der Okeechobee, der
Wollamaloo).

So perhaps the feminine-for-smaller-rivers is purely an
inside-Germanophonia thing.

Shows yet again how hard it is to translate native-speaker intuition
into a rule in writing :)

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