Re: My first romlang sentence

On Friday, February 25, 2005, at 04:12 , Muke Tever wrote:

> Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
[snip]
>> As I understand it, canis is a feminine noun in Latin.
Nope.

> I thought rather that it's common gender, that is, following the natural
> gender of the dog in question.
You thought quite correctly. It is what is often called _epicene_ - where
sex is important it follows the natural sex/gender of the canine in
question. If you couldn't care less whether the critter's a dog or a bitch,
  then the default gender is masculine.

French _chien_ (m) is derived quite regularly from _canis_. It has now
developed its oen feminine form _chienne_.
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On Friday, February 25, 2005, at 04:44 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

[snip]
> For Latin reference, I use the Perseus Project's online version of
> Lewis and Short's dictionary.  Here's the entry for canis:
>
> http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-
> bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3D%236507
Which is OK for Classical Latin - but all the Romance languages are
derived frm Vulgar Latin which was not quite the same. If one is aiming to
construct a plausible Romancelang, one should start from VL. Off hand, I
do not know a URL but I'll look.

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]