Re: How old is the machismo in Romance languages

--- 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.