--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> Latin
> _mare_ 'sea' is neuter, as is to be expected from its form, but
> although Italian _mare_ and Spanish _mar_ are masculine, French
> _mer_ is feminine.
Add to this the curious phenomenon, in Spanish, of having the same
noun, meaning the same thing, in both genders depending on "emotional"
context: _mar_ ("sea"), _calor_ ("heat"), etc., normally masculine but
sometimes feminine. One curious example:
"Unidos hemos de estar la gran familia que formamos todas las personas
que tenemos relación con la mar, especialmente vosotros los hombres
del mar," ... (snip)
(This is from a document titled, equally curiously:
"Festividad de la Virgen del Carmen Día de las Gentes del Mar
LA MAR, RETO A LA SOLIDARIDAD
Exhortación Pastoral del Obispo Promotor del Apostolado del Mar")
As for "heat", as a physical property it is always masculine, but when
in Córdoba the temperature gets above about 42 C, people start to
complain about "la caló"... :-)
Any similar phenomena in other languages? There are a bunch of nouns
in Italian that change gender from singular to plural; and there is
German _See_ (f) and _See_ (m), but they are different sets of water.
(I hope amateur linguists are tolerated here...)
Rudy