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Re: Gender of rivers - and other waters.

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Sunday, October 5, 2008, 10:58
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@...>