On Monday, 2 May 2016 at 01:13:50 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
Actually, in just about every language that makes gender
distinctions
the choice of gender for any given noun is basically arbitrary.
Even
languages with a common ancestor may assign different genders
to the
same ancestral noun (IIRC in Portuguese vs. Spanish, though I
can't
recall the specific example off the top of my head).
In Galician and Portuguese the word for `message` is feminine
while it is masculine in Spanish (and French I guess).
a mensaxe (Gal.)
a mensagem (Pt.)
el mensaje (Sp.)
which applies to all words ending in -axe/-aje I think.
In Irish, there are words that have different genders in
different dialects which is due to the fact that Irish used to
have three genders masculine, feminine and neuter. Neuter died
out and the words had to "choose" which gender they wanted to
belong to. Hence the "gender difference" between dialects. There
are even some words that change gender when in a different case:
talamh (m, Nominative singular) `land`
na talún (f, Genitive singular) `of the land`, `the land's`
although `tailimh` (m, Genitive singular exists too).
In Bavarian some words have a different gender than in Standard
German, e.g:
der Butter (standard: die Butter)
der Radio (standard: das Radio)
