la leche (was: Re: txakur/dzhagaru/cachorro..)..

[Leo A. Connolly]

> Leo Connolly wrote:

> >The larger question is why we have _leche_ (as well as It. _latte_, Fr.
> >_lait_ when there was no **_lactem_ so long as the word was neuter.  But if
> >_lactem_ developed, then gender reassignment would be a must, and formally
> >there would have been no reason to choose masculine over feminine.  Why
> >shouldn't a product of the female breast become feminine?  If anything, it's
> >the masculine forms that need explaining.

> Diogo Almeida wrote:

> I'm no specialist and I don't know what was the vulgar latin or the early
> romance word for milk on the Peninsula at that time, but my latin dictionary
> gives "lacte, is" for milk (and "lac" as an archaic form). I think that
> "lactem" then, would have been the accusative form (I have to rely on my
> memory, though, since I don't have any Latin grammar with me :) ).
> Portuguese, as a general rule, got the accusative form of latin words. So
> "lactem" being the accusative, it seems likely that the word in Portuguese
> developed from that form (I don't have an etymological dictionary with me,
> though). And since neuter was absorbed by the masculine gender in general
> (at least in Portuguese, I don't know about Spanish), i don't see any
> problems with "leite" being masculine. On the other hand, "leche" as
> feminine is strange to me, especially because Portuguese and Spanish
> normally agree when it comes to the gender of the words.

I'm no specialist either (Germanic philology is my thing, at least officially).
But my Latin dictionary (an old Cassell's from the 1930s) lists only _lac_, not
_lacte_.  Still, it is conceivable that _lacte_ arose in Vulgar Latin, and it
would be a perfectly good ancestor of _leche_ et al.

Connolly again:

    >"formally there would have been no reason to choose masculine over
feminine.

> >Why shouldn't a product of the female breast become feminine?  If anything,
> >it's the masculine forms that need explaining."

Diogo again:

> If the gender systems of Portuguese and Spanish were mainly semantically
> driven, maybe. But they aren't. There is a strong formal element in gender
> assingment in these languages. And as I said before, I think that neuter
> words become masculine in Portuguese most of the time (and I guess this is
> also true for Spanish).

Well, yes -- the point is that in the Latin third declension, masculine and
feminine forms are normally indistinguishable, so that the word for 'forehead'
is _frons, frontis_ (feminine) and for 'mountain' _mons, montis_ (masculine).
The reason why Latin neuters usually become masculine in  Romance is that most
belong to the second declension, otherwise the home of many masculine nouns and
only a few feminines, from which they differed only in the nominative singular
and nominative accusative plural.  There were no first-declension neuters, so
they had no particular to turn feminine along with most of the rest of that
declension.  Some third-declension neuters ended up *looking* masculine:
_corpus_ 'body' looked suspiciously like a second-declension masculine
nominative, so it is no surprise to find Spanish _cuerpo_ masculine rather than
feminine.  But there were no third-declension neuters that *looked* feminine.
Still, I had no trouble finding one that is now feminine in Spanish: _u:ber_
(gen. _u:beris_) 'udder, teat, breat' has yielded _la ubre_ 'udder'.  Are we
surprised?  We shouldn't be, just as we are not surprised that the formally
ambiguous Latin _penis_ is masculine rather than feminine.

This from a non-specialist.  What do the experts say?

Leo

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