gender assignment

[Nicholas Widdows]

<Larry Trask wrote:>

Interestingly, the genderless Basque has started borrowing gender from
Spanish.
[snip]
The new pattern has even spread to a few native words.  For example,
native <gixajo> `poor fellow', whose final <-o> is coincidental and has
nothing to do with any sex-marking, has, for many speakers, acquired a
counterpart <gixaja>, applied to women, in line with the Spanish system
of marking gender.  Basque may perhaps be in the early stages of
acquiring from its neighbor a gender system which it formerly lacked
absolutely.

</Larry Trask>

Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a stems, e.g.
*<zaharro> 'old (man)' or *<txikio> by reinterpretation of the native <-a>?
Or is it a restricted lexical thing, the way we have in English with
fiance/e and blond/e? Of course these are pronounced the same but being
literate we have to decide how to write them, and do consistently mark
gender. Words where there's a spoken difference are so rare that perhaps we
don't have to decide. He is always nai"ve, as is she, but she is a...
faux-nai"f? I would say 'a Filipino housemaid', because if I decide that
maids are Filipin-a, what is the Filipin-o/a language, culture, etc...
Rather than having to think "now what gender is <lengaje>?" it's easier to
force gender out, they way we have with employee, divorcee, naive. The
influence of French is small enough that these will remain oddities like
foreign plurals rather than influence the grammar.

Nicholas Widdows