--- In norse_course@egroups.com, "Keth " <keth@...> wrote:

> I'll accept your word Haukur.
> You are much more accustomed to the use of the language
> that I or any one else of the non-natives will ever be,
> though in Norway we still have the nynorsk language that
> includes the three m/f/n genders. But in this case it
> doesn't seem to help me much.

That's interesting! In that case, how's the distinction between
masculine and feminine made, in, say, adjectives?

> Anyway, the point made was that childeren are looked
> upon as sexless. "Eit barn" -- "Das Kind", "Das Maedchen"
> usw.. It is only grownups that must be described
> as either male or female. (tertia non datur)

But then one can still specify the child's gender with words
like "strákur" ('boy', masculine, MnIce) and "stelpa" ('girl',
feminine). Adults can be referred to as "fullorðnir" ('grown-ups', an
adjective often used as a masculine noun), masculine even though it'd
contain women; "manneskja" ('human being', feminine) can be a man
even though it's feminine. The point is, the _words_ themselves have
a pretty arbitrarily assigned gender which sticks to them whatever
the actual gender is.

That these arbitrary groupings of nouns are called "genders" is
genuinely misleading. The case is rather that genders are assigned to
the declension groups rather than vice versa. I.e. all male _persons_
are assigned to a declension that is hence called "masculine" by
grammarians who observe that all males have their adjectives declined
the same way; but that group still has lots of words that have
absolutely nothing to do with masculinity. In Germanic
languages, "sun" is feminine, while "moon" is masculine; in Romance
languages, "sun" is masculine and "moon" feminine; it has nothing to
do with how the speakers see the nature of those entities. It's just
that the respective word stems or suffixes have traditionally been
declined like other words in a certain group (gender).
The nature and origin of grammatic genders isn't necessarily
exactly as I described above; but I'd say to students that this is
the most *practical* way to see them: as simple, arbitrary, green-red-
blue, masculine-feminine-neuter, apple-peach-strawberry, or whatever
one comes up with, divisions of words into groups of declensions.

Óskar