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On Thursday 21 November 2002 12:11 pm, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 10:07:01AM -0500, Net Llama! wrote:
> >AFAIK, only ships are referred to as women. Everything else is
> > gender neutral.
>
> Back when I was taking French and Latin, it seemed to me that most
> nouns naming unpleasant things were feminine.
Latin is one language I read fluently and I have no such memory. There
is a Latin dictionary on the Web (actually more than one) and it fails
to support this. However, a great many unpleasant things are neutral
and a lot of them are masculine. The remnants of the common gender
(found mainly in older Latin documents) also range the gammet. We tend
to forget that linguistic gender is not (in gender-inflected languages)
related to sexual gender.
Originally there were five "genders": masculine (so called because
"vir" means male, despite St. Theresa), feminine ("femina" means
female), neuter, common and something everyone uses a different name
for, but one linguist calls "quantic". Actually, these are modern
terms, as originally they were simply noun classes named after more
commonly used words of that gender.
This is sort of like thinking fsck is a dirty word.
- --
Robert Black Eagle
Liberty is an Open Government and Privacy for Civilians.
Tyranny is a Closed Government and No Privacy for Civilians.
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