Latin....... the start of modern languages

[aronnax]

I wonder why in English ships are femenine.

They are masculine in Spanish?

 

[Arwon]

I know barco (boat) is masculine. Isn't nave (ship) feminine, Thorgalaeg?

What I think he means, is why don't English-speakers use "it" for ships since "she" and "he" actually mean physical gender, not just grammatical? The answer is that using "she" shows affection for the ship and anthropomorphises it. It's slightly poetic, perhaps like the difference between el mar and la mar.

A lot of men do the same thing with cars.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I know barco (boat) is masculine. Isn't nave (ship) feminine, Thorgalaeg?

Correct. But in Spanish there is not neutral gender. So things are necessarily masculine or femenine.

 

[Mirc]

I know barco (boat) is masculine. Isn't nave (ship) feminine, Thorgalaeg?

In Romanian they are both feminine. "Barca" (plural "barci") and "nava" (plural "nave"). Dunno why.

@Mirc: the candelabru/e is close, but the candela/e is indeed identic! C'mon, whisper in my ear the vulgar one, let's see if they're somehow related

I don't need to whisper it in your ear, it is the name of a city in Croatia!! And the name of the currency of Bostwana.
[wiki]Pula[/wiki].
Edit: It was part of the kingdom of Italy from 1918 to 1947. There is also a small town in Italy with the same name.

 

[Sofista]

Disappointingly, the Sicilian word (minchia) is absolutely unrelated. But its significance is international, as Frank Zappa sung about it (warning: you know what to expect from Frank, right?).

 

[Mirc]

Disappointingly, the Sicilian word (minchia) is absolutely unrelated. But its significance is international, as Frank Zappa sung about it (warning: you know what to expect from Frank, right?).

Still, even though it's unrelated to the Sicilian one, apparently the word is of Latin origin, since in Portuguese there's a very similar word, AFAIK.

(don't quote me on this though, I just heard it about 2 weeks ago from a Brazilian friend of mine)

 

[Sofista]

I searched into a dictionary, and in Italian it means "chaff", and apparently derives from Latin apluda.

Say, is this Romanian?

 

[Mirc]

Say, is this Romanian?

Yeah!! Thanks for the link!! I finally understood the etymology of the word! (now it seems so obvious)

My attempt at a translation:

This word has a long tradition in the Romanian langauge. Although it was ignored (ignored is not the best word, but best I could think of) by our linguists. In his "Etymologic Dictionary", Ovidiu Densusianu has the courage to write about the "pula". "Pula" comes from the Latin "polla", -am that is the feminine form of "pullus", with the meaning "chicken", or very young animal - of any kind (it's interesting to note that in Romanian "pui" still has this meaning - and I'm sure in Italian a similar word exists, as it does in French). The term came to be transferred at humans to become a "nickname" (there is absolutely no way I can translate in English "nume de alint", nickname is the best I could find), as in "dear", "chicken", "treasure" (used with this meaning even in Latin by Plautus, Horatius, Suetonius); after which it performed a jump into the erotic language: in an old Latin poem, an old homosexual taking a child as his lover calls him "chicken" (again, this "cute nickname" meaning is still persistent in Romanian too). It is not known however what meaning the word has in Vulgar Latin.

The word is in the Romanian language since its very beginnings; it was from us borrowed by some neighboring peoples, with the meaning we know today. Thus, the word entered Hungarian, and our neighbors were never afraid to name their settlements with it (there are villages called "Pula" in the communes Sopron, Somogy, Komaron, Zala, Tolna, in 1225, in the Kingdom of Hungary), and they even used it as surnames: Pulai Istvan (1608), Pulay Thomas, Georgius Pulaj, Franciscus Pulay etc. (Pulai would be the equivalent of "Puleanu", meaning "from Pula").

Neither the Romanians let the word unexplored. In 1594, in the county of Simleu, in the "judet" Salaj (judet is an administrative division in Romania, roughly equivalent in modern Romanian with the English "county") a king called Luca Pula was reigning. And in the Brusturi commune in "judet" Maramures, we have the village "Podpula", and in "The Romanians", in the IX-XIV centuries, the linguist Nicolae Draganu attests Pula as a proper person name, saying "I have even met a waiter with this name".

So "pula" is a word with a perfume of antiquity, a word with tradition ignored by the dictionaries. In The Dictionary of the Academy we can find the banal "cur" (vulgar word for anus), however on "pula" an absolute silence is dropped - Romanian linguists pretending they have never heard it.

Thanks again for the link, this was a great read.

 

[Fugitive Sisyphus]

I wonder why in English ships are femenine.

I heard it was because a ship, like any woman, shows her topsides, hides her bottom and, when coming into port, always heads for the buoys.

 

[Zhuge_Liang]

Mirc, "pula" in our language is red.