gender assignment

[Larry Trask]

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote:

[The moderator has pulled the plug on the purely historical discussion,
but perhaps I might comment on the interesting linguistic point raised
at the end of Roz's posting.]

> And, on another note, certainly today many of those kids in Bilbao who
> speak only Spanish but find it "hip" to talk about going home to
> "hacer las lanas" have little or no idea what the word really means in
> Euskara, for them its their "homework", a perfectly valid Spanish
> word, a feminine noun regularly used in the plural. In Euskera, the
> word is obviously not masculine or feminine (Euskera has no gender
> marking in nouns), nor is <lan> used only in the plural to refer
> exclusively to "homework."

A Basque noun or adjective is most commonly used with the suffixed
article <-a> attached, and hence Spanish-speakers would be more likely
to hear <lana> rather than merely <lan> for `work'.  When they borrowed
the word, they had to assign it a gender, and it's not surprising that
the word was made feminine, since final <-a> is the usual feminine
marker in Spanish.  But I can't guess why the word became plural in
Spanish, or how it came to be restricted to `homework'.

There are other such cases.  A nice one is this.  As is well known, the
name of even the tiniest settlement gives rise in Spanish to a derived
noun/adjective meaning `(person) from [that place]'.  I've no idea what
the traditional Spanish derivative for the Basque town of San Sebastian
(Basque <Donostia>) might be, or even if there is one.  But, in recent
years, the Basque word <donostiar> `(person) from SS' has been taken
into Spanish, where it is assigned two forms: masculine <donostiar> and
feminine <donostiarra>.  It is possible that the Basque word was
borrowed without the article, and that Spanish then added its own
typical feminine ending to get the feminine form.  But I consider it
more likely that the more frequent Basque definite form <donostiarra>
was borrowed, interpreted as feminine because of its final <-a>, and
then given the obvious Spanish masculine counterpart.  Anyway, this word
is now used throughout Spain.

Some others are confined to the local Spanish of the north, such as the
feminine noun <chistorra>, taken from Basque <txistorra>, the definite
form of the noun <txistor> `a certain type of sausage'.

Of course, many Basque words happen to end in <-a> or <-o> anyway, and,
when these are borrowed into the local Spanish, they are usually
assigned a Spanish gender matching the ending.  So, <txano> `hood',
<hamarreko> `scoring token in the game of mus' and <marmitako> `stew'
are masculine in Spanish, while <sokatira> `tug of war', <ikastola>
`Basque-language school' and <arbigara> `turnip green' are feminine.

An exception is <anderen~o> `female teacher in a Basque-language
school', which in spite of its form is feminine in Spanish, because of
its meaning.

Interestingly, the genderless Basque has started borrowing gender from
Spanish.  A number of Spanish adjectives, such as <majo> `nice' and
<tonto> `stupid, foolish', have been taken into Basque complete with
their Spanish gender distinctions: hence Basque <majo> and <maja>,
<tonto> and <tonta>, with the forms in <-a> applied to females and the
forms in <-o> used in all other cases.  This is fairly new.  Previously
Basque just borrowed a Romance adjective in its masculine form and used
it invariantly.

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.

[moderator]

>   (Is there a Basque-L?)

Yes, there is, and both Roz and I subscribe to it.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk