The Sun: a female word...

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

One explanation of why the sun is feminine in the Germanic tongues is that  
for the north Europeans the sun is a gentle, nurturing thing. However, it might 
 be helpful to have comment from members whose mother tongue has grammatical  
genders: do they feel that the gender of a word denoting a non-living thing 
ever  tends to imply qualities associated with male or female sex, or could the 
two or  three genders of French, German, etc just has well have been called 
"class 1",  "class 2" etc? Perhaps the sun's grammatical she-ness for the 
Goths, the  Anglo-Saxons, and others no more demands explanation than why the word 
begins  with S.
 
Gerry T.
 
 


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20090129/63cb3c17/attachment.htm>