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Gender Specific Nouns in the Amharic Language
Ethiopia is one of the oldest countries in the world; it has yielded some of ... Gender Specific Nouns in the Amharic Language. Like most Latin languages, Amharic nouns can ...
https://www.alsglobal.net/languages/amharic.php - Cached

Here's one to check into?

14 years ago. Rating: 2
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maybe adam...

14 years ago. Rating: 0
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I took German in high school and I know that the German language does this, as well as Spanish...

14 years ago. Rating: 0
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I've even asked linguistic experts, no one knows who originally assigned the gender to words. Spooky huh?

14 years ago. Rating: 0
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Hermaphrodytes...

14 years ago. Rating: 0
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Indo-European nouns were originally what we call "masculine".
Nouns that were seldom used in the nominative (the subject form) lost it and became "neuter". Their remaining ("oblique") cases were identical to the masculine in the singular (thus in English, "his" meant "of him" and "of it" until the late 1500s. Instead of having a plural these "neuter" nouns formed collective nouns (requiring originally a verb in the singular) in -A.
These collective came to be used for the contents of an animal's den, i.e. the mother and young. Eventually new singulars in -A came to designate the mother animal on her own and formed new plurals. This was the origin of "feminine" nouns.
Gradually this "feminine" category was used for nouns seen as "female." Thus the origin word for "water" remained neuter but the Latin novelty of "aqua" became neutral from the concept of its penetrability. "Moon" was masculine, but this word in Latin acquired the sense of "month" and the moon came to be called "Luna", the shining one, presumably in contrast to the masculine "Sun". In the Germanic languages however where the original masculine word for "moon" was kept, "sun" became feminine by contrast.

14 years ago. Rating: 0
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