It seems to me that an awful lot of time is spent
debating *why* certain nouns are "masculine"and others "feminine", in various
languages. I mean no disrespect to my betters, but surely the
gender-distinction might have been the natural result of the mixing of
vocabularies following invasions by male-dominated armies? I will go no
further than to offer the suggestion that it is indeed conceivable.
Thus, words brought into a merger in some region (of whatever size) by
a male-dominated invasion force might have been considered "masculine" and
the contributions of their captives (female-dominated, perforce, by the female
concubines and house-slaves) from their own language considered
"feminine". That might at least explain the differences of gender applied
within the several IE-derived languages to words of the same meanings.
It might be that the same phenomenon occurred in
the adoption of "pet-names". A Saxon or Viking man in Britain who called
his son Henry or Hendrik or similar, might have been subverted by his native
woman's use of Harry. Thus William and Bill, and perhaps Jo(h)n and
Jack.
If this point has been definitively settled by
scholars (one way or the other), and the argument appears on the Web, I would be
very grateful to be directed to the relevant site - and of course
would apologise for raising the matter here.
Gordon Barlow