Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Why are some nouns masculine and some feminine?

One of my colleagues asked me this question the other day and I couldn't answer it for a while. Obviously there's not much of this in English but there is a lot in other languages. I wondered if maybe it started off with Caveman one talking to Caveman two and saying "Nice" while pointing at a woman and then wanted to show he was talking about her not the bloke standing behind her by changing the end of the word. Of course this might just be rubbish. The beauty of that point in time is that it is so far in the past that we can never know but can speculate endlessly...

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