Gender of Russian loan words

[Annie Burke]

Hello Seelangtsy!

I've been a seelangs subscriber for some time but only recently came
across a question worthy of your collective wisdom. I studied Russian
in college and have spent enough time in Russia to speak the language
fairly well, and have taken it upon myself to teach a friend of mine.
We were going over gender of nouns this afternoon, and read in our
Pulkina textbook from the 80s or 90s that loan words are neuter. But
then he started asking whether words like музей, библиотека, альбом,
etc. are neuter. I thought no, of course not! But when I looked in my
dictionary I found that they were! However, a search on rambler.ru
says that they are masculine, feminine and masculine, respectively. My
suspicion is that two decades ago such words were loan-ey enough to be
neuter, but now, especially with globalization gone wild, such words
have been sufficiently adopted to take on what seem like more logical
genders.

Does anybody out there have any more detailed information about this
type of gender transition? This seems like a pretty massive change in
grammar to happen over the fewer than 15 years that has passed since
my dictionary (Katzner) was published!

Spasibo bol'shoe,

Annie

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