Re: How old is the machismo in Romance languages

From: Gordon Barlow
Message: 38769
Date: 2005-06-19

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