Re: How old is the machismo in Romance languages

From: pielewe
Message: 38749
Date: 2005-06-19

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, mkapovic@... wrote:


> Nope, no such thing here. I was talking about:
> masc. mus^karac "man" (but also mus^ko - neuter!!!),
curetak/curic^ak
> "little girl", zid "wall", mjesec "moon"
> fem. z^ena "woman", trava "grass", budala "fool"
>
> Budala (a Turkic loanword) is of fem. gender whether it applies to
man or
> a woman (agreement - ova budala "this fool"). And it's not by the
way fem.
> because it's derrogatory but because it's a loanword which ends in -
a.
>
> Hmm, but I just thought of a thing that could be indeed sexist in
nature.
> It concerns nouns in -ica which are declined as fem. but can agree
with
> masc. adj. and verbs. Thus we have izbjeglica "refugee",
poglavica "chief
> (of the tribe)" which can agree only with masc. (ovaj izbjeglica,
ovaj
> poglavica), but kukavica "coward" and izdajica "traitor" can agree
with
> both masc. and fem. (ovaj/ova kukavica, ovaj/ova izdajica). That
could be
> because the latter examples are derogatory although I do not feel
any
> difference in saying those with masc. or fem. agreement.(I usually
use
> only the fem. agreement as a rule).
>


Interesting, I wasn't aware of the _curic^ak_ type. By the way, it
has always been my impression that plural gender in Croatian comes
fairly close to lacking meaning altogether. There is a type of
sixteenth-century written Croatian where the plural endings just
rhyme, so you say things like _oc^i njegovi_ and _kosti moji_ instead
of near-universal feminine _njegove_ and _moje_ (the examples are
from the texts known as "Psalmi Davidovi fra Luke Brac^anina").


Croatian also has the dvojica/dvoje type, where the presence of a
single female in the group makes use of the masculine form _dvojica_
impossible, so the reverse of the situation the original complaint
was about. (The late Mihailo Stevanovic, famous for his two-volume
normative grammar that appeared in the fifties, was equally renowned
for his inability or refusal to follow his own precepts in real life,
always using collocations like _nas dvojica_ if referring to a
company consisting of himself and a single female student.)


W.