Re: [tied] 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.

It's a highly expressive formation.

> 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").

Funny... It was probably an attempt to make i-stem adjectives/pronouns to
agree completely with i-stem nouns.

> 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.

Yes. This dvojica(m)/dvoje (m/f)/dvije(f) type could be considered one of
the most democratic ones :)
I wonder though aren't some of the things that feminist critics demand
linguistically impossible (I'm talking about 1 man + a 1000 women case). I
mean, we can have 3 ways of dealing with this - either 1 man + 1000 women
go by some neutral/third agreement, either by masc. (as is the case) or by
fem.
I think that a system which would count how many men and women are there
and which would show agreement in according to that (more men - masc, more
women - fem) is impossible in real languages. Language just does not work
like that.

Mate