Re: How old is the machismo in Romance languages

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

> Well, I don't really think that. I just think that feminist often

complain

> about wrong things. For instance, I once heard a feminist saying

that it

> is suspicious that in Croatian feminine gender (a-stems) has the N.

sg.

> always different from the A. sg. but that it's sometimes the same in
> masculine (o-stems).

I agree there is a lot of nonsense about and I have seen the example
and have wrestled with the question what on earth it was supposed to
mean. But one should realize that the underlying party in such
configurations tends to do that kind of thing.



[On situations of the type "one man + a thousand women go with masc.
agreement".]

> Yes, but this has a lot to do with the pretty much arbitrary name
> masculine gender.

No, it has less to do with the name than with the fact that the
presence of a single male suffices to produce a result that is the
same as what you get when only males are present, and also, one would
think, with the corresponding learning phase and its after-effects.

(But languages presumably do differ in this respect. It may not be an
accident that "common gender" use of _he_ was resisted earliest in
English, which has no grammatical gender. In Dutch natural gender and
semantic considerations regularly override grammatical gender. Etc.)

> I mean, in my native language, man is masc., but my
> girlfriend can also be in diminutive, a wall is also masc., as well

as the

> moon. OK, women is fem. gender, but so is the grass, and a man who

is a

> fool.

Could you give an example of that? Is it the same as what used to
exist in Czech (I'm not sure it's still alive), according to which
feminine endings in adjectives etc. were considered humiliating when
applied to boys, e.g. _hloupá Honzo_.

> So, it looks like it's pretty arbitrary to call genders masc. and
> fem. If it were not so, I wonder how many feminists would have this

kind

> of objection.
> Also, this kind of stuff may seem chauvinistic now, but it's clear

that

> diachronically speaking, this is not so.
>

I agree that much of it reflects social facts that existed many
generations ago.




Willem