Alberto Monteiro schreef: > 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 :-)
You are right. English is relatively simple compared to that. But this sounds somewhat similar to German. They also have gender and conjugations tied in with each other, so it is rather complex to learn properly. Especially if you have no natural feel for the language. French only has la, le and les. I think the conjugations are not that complex and independent of the gender. But it's been too long for me to tell for sure. One thing I do know is that when something is female in German don't count on it to be so in French. Most likely it isn't. I know I failed many tests using the assumption of similarity between languages. ;o) Sonja
