Sonja van Baardwijk-Holten wrote: > > <Nitpick> > And even I know that 'revolution' is female ....so it should > be 'la' revolution..... > </Nitpick> > > But I wonder why that is. Anybody got an idea why some > words are female, male or neutral in German and French... > Any other languages that have genderspecific > prefixes. > Probably those nouns in _-tion_ in French are feminine because they were feminine in Latin, as they are also feminine in other Latin-derived languages.
The real problem for us comes from words that are feminine in one language and masculine in others; for example _la mer_ (f in fr) and _o mar_ (m in pt) [the sea]. Spanish is even weirder, because there is a _neutral_ article, but nouns are either m or f: _lo bono_ [Good as an abstraction] != _el bono_ [good as a concrete thing, for example, the goodies of a company] Not to mention that adjectives and articles change due to gender or number: _o_, _a_, _os_, _as_ (m,sing; f,sing; m,plural; f,plural in pt) [the]; _novo_, _nova_, _novos_, _novas_ [new]. And did I mention that there are _6_ different verbal conjugations for each verbal time? And that some of the "time" modes can be expressed in two [or even more] different ways, either using a single expression or a composition? And that some verbs are totally irregular, even sharing some cases with other verbs, maybe in a different time? English, with its ideographic symbols, is a very easy language :-) Alberto Monteiro
