Re: word gender identity

Mark J. Reed sikyal:

> On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 05:30:19PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> > > It that a French-only phenomenon?
>
> > Il uovo, le uova in Italian (not gli uovi).
>
> That is interesting.  I'm not aware of any examples in Spanish
> (the Romance language with which I have the most experience), but
> I guess it's a logical possbility when developing from a language
> with three genders into one with only two.
I don't know of any examples from Spanish, either, but this situation is
abundant in Romanian, which never lost the neuter at all. Morphological
shifts have made it so that the neut.sg. is equivalent to the masc.sg.,
and the neut.pl. is equivalent to the fem.pl., like above.

Eg:

casa - the house; casele - the houses
baiatul - the boy; baietii - the boys

BUT
oul - the egg; ouale - the eggs


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"