Gender of Russian loan words

[Irina Shevelenko]

Annie,

Loan nouns which end on a consonant or short 'i' are masculine; loan nouns which end on -a or -ia are feminine, unless they are proper names of men. Loan words which end on -o, -e or have other endings which do not conform to any Nominative Singular type of Russian nouns are neuter, unless they designate animated creatures. E.g., 'taksi' is neuter, but 'kolibri' (a bird) is not: it is feminine, because it is "ptitsa". It is more tricky with 'kenguru', though, since there is no generic group to which we can assign the word; the gender of this word fluctuates, but the tendency is to consider it masculine, unless we want to emphasize the sex of the animal. A recent notable exception from the rule outlined about is, of course, 'evro' (a currency), which became masculine soon after its introduction into the language.

The three words you initially brought up never could be neuter in Russian. Neuter in general is considered a non-productive gender in modern Russian, i.e., new words are rarely neuter. Masculine is the most productive gender, with feminine somewhere in between. Several nouns in the course of the 20th century changed their gender from feminine to masculine, e.g.,: film (from 'filma'), zal (from 'zala'), roial' (without changing the form became masculine).

Best,

Irina Shevelenko

-----Original Message-----
From: Annie Burke <annis.f.burke at GMAIL.COM>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 19:07:02 -0500
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Gender of Russian loan words

> Sorry for such a quick follow-up - I figured out what was going on with
> those three particular words but still would be very interested in any
> general information about the way noun gender changes over time from any
> readers!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Annie
> 
> 2009/5/10 Annie Burke <annis.f.burke at gmail.com>
> 
> > 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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