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Gender Congruency in Romance Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6368 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 22 23 March 2010 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
But doesn't the masculine form of a fruit mean the tree that produces it? Like "la naranja" = "the orange" and "el naranjo" means "the orange tree"? So it would remain feminine in this example to keep the congruency. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kerateo Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5646 days ago 112 posts - 180 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French Studies: Italian | Message 18 of 22 23 March 2010 at 3:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Personally, for French and Italian I just use the Spanish gender, I know I will be right 90-95% of the time, and since I don't care about having more than a 80 % fluency, that works perfect for me. In the time you learn all the minor differences you could actually learn another language :).
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| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5453 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 19 of 22 23 March 2010 at 9:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, fruto is not the tree, it is the fruit. The feminine fruta is used for the ones we typically eat, e.g. oranges. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6665 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 20 of 22 26 March 2010 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There is a recognizable pattern: words that were feminine in Latin are generally feminine in the modern Romance languages, words that were neuter or masculin are masculine in today's Romance languages. The exceptions you cited are exactly that: exceptions. For the vast majority of nouns the above rule is valid. PS: This is especially true for large classes of nouns sharing certain cognate endings: -tion, -cao, -cion, -zione almost always indicate feminine nouns. Edited by Marc Frisch on 26 March 2010 at 8:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 21 of 22 28 March 2010 at 1:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Somehow I'm not comfortable with writing off these differences as just exceptions. It seems that many of the modern languages had differing handling for cognates that were originally neuter in Classical Latin (it reminds me somewhat of how declension of numerals in most Slavonic languages numerals got "screwed up" when the dual faded away). Here are a couple of sources which show that a simple generalization of cognates' gender to all Romance languages using the example of just one or two Romance languages is far less useful than one would think. http://dspace.nitle.org/handle/10090/8323 (scroll down the screen to click on a .pdf link that is called "s10inde2008washington.pdf" in the box "Files in this item") The study's author finds that gender incongruency for cognates in the modern Romance languages is affected by idiosyncratic developments (e.g. analogies, phonological changes to old endings) in each of the descendants of Vulgar Latin. In addition she finds that modern cognates originating from the third declension in Latin (which also was the largest class of nouns) had their genders reinterpreted the most among the modern Romance languages. It has partially something to do with how the endings were starting to be mixed up even in Vulgar Latin which had already reduced the three genders of Classical Latin into two. It is illuminating how the study explains why Romance cognates for "flower", "colour", "milk", "sea" and many others appear with genders that vary from one language to the next (the analysis of the inconsistencies in cognates from the third declension begins on Chapter 4 or p. 38 of the study). Pages 52-55 have tables showing the inconsistency of gender assignment in commonly-used Romance cognates. The largest list of irregularities comes from the cognates of the 3rd declension in Latin. http://accurapid.com/journal/42gender.htm This is a translator's "cheat sheet" for managing to keep track of gender for cognates in Romance. It shows example cognates from Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Latin (sorry, no Romanian). The "femininity" of nouns ending in -tion, -cao, -cion, -zione is well-known, and this trait has also passed on into German with loanwords ending with the suffix also being feminine. However, many nouns in Romance do not come with such a sure-fire marker of grammatical gender like -tion/-cao/-cion/-zione, and it's not as if a noticeable part of every-day lexicon is dominated by words ending in this way. I have found that a better approach for learning gender in Romance languages is to try first to detect patterns applicable to the Romance language in question, rather than try to "cheat" by applying gender assignment in the related languages. When I was taking Latin in high school, I tried to cheat a bit by assigning French genders to Latin words if I couldn't remember the gender in the Latin ancestor. Now, if I could have got a dime for every half-point lost on those Latin tests because I was assigning the wrong gender to Latin words by relying on my background in French... Learning Romanian was a similar story for me. I pretty much had to learn genders one-by-one for most new words because of all of the development and external influence since it evolved from Vulgar Latin, with genders of cognates not usually matching what I was used to in French or from what I could remember in Latin. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| crackpot Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6301 days ago 144 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 22 of 22 28 March 2010 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have to agree with kerateo on this. Though I know French better, I sometimes use
Spanish to help me remember the gender of French words and I'm right 95% of the time. If I'm writing something I would look it up but for online chatting or everyday speech no problem. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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