X-no-Archive:yes
I guess it's important to remember that to some degree, grammars include
plausible explanations for why a language behaves the way it does, and those
explanations are inventions. And, clearly, one need not know this
metalanguage in order to speak the language. So, any explanation of "gender"
in a language is probably just that, an explanation, after the fact. And
these serve at least in part as an aid to those learning a language the hard
way, as a second language.

In those languages which I am familiar (which includes Classical or Attic
Greek, somewhat upstream of Latin, and which has three declensions, only one
of which includes masculine, feminine, and neuter), which have grammatical
gender, there is some overlap with real gender. The pronoun I would use to
refer to a man is also the pronoun I would use with a noun whose grammatical
gender is masculine. This is correspondingly true of the feminine pronoun.
So, while there is frequently nothing gender-specific about a noun with
grammatical gender, it consistently behaves as though there is. In fact, in
Greek, nouns which appear in more than one gender tend to have a change in
meaning associated with that change in gender. Oikos, masculine, is a house
or home. Oikia, feminine, is an institutional house, such as a temple or
place of worship.

But I still don't understand which of the two interpretations of Jeff Kell's
original question is the one that he intended.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
He certainly knew a lot of languages,
but it didn't do him any good.

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