Sum: French VAGIN

[Larry Trask]

Some days ago I posted a query as to why French VAGIN `vagina' should
have masculine gender and form in place of the expected feminine
*VAGINE.
 
Several people responded with various suggestions and bits of
information.  Here's what turned up.
 
First, the phonological form of VAGIN virtually guarantees that it
will be masculine, since -IN is a highly reliable masculine ending.
But, of course, this doesn't explain why the word has a masculine form
in the first place.
 
A further complication is that the word, clearly borrowed from Latin,
is attested in 1611 in the feminine form VAGINE, in the sense of
`scabbard'.
 
The following suggestions were put forward.
 
1. French VAGIN derives directly from an unrecorded Latin *VAGINUS or
*VAGINUM.
 
2. Latin VAGINA was mistakenly interpreted as a neuter plural, and an
erroneous singular *VAGINUM was extracted and used as the source of
VAGIN.
 
3. The word was attracted into the masculine gender by the influence
of the synonymous everyday word CON (from Latin CUNNUS), which is, of
course, masculine, and the form was adjusted accordingly.
 
4. The word for `vagina' was deliberately altered into a masculine
form in order to distance it from the existing VAGINE `scabbard'.
 
The third suggestion was the most popular, but it seems clear that
nobody really knows.
 
My thanks to Richard Coates, Marc Picard, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal,
Ralf-Stefan Georg, Nicholas Ostler, and one other person whose
response I deleted by mistake during a burst of housecleaning.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
England
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk