RE: FW: the old insure ensure assure

["Leonard C. Porrello" <Leonard -dot- Porrello -at- SoleraTec -dot- com>]

I think you can infer an (unfortunately dull and unsatisfying) answer to
your question from this:
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-grammatical-gender.htm.

In short, 'grammatical gender' doesn't necessarily have anything to do
with 'natural gender'.

"In many languages, grammatical gender and natural gender correlate
rather loosely, much to the frustration of second language learners. In
French and Spanish, every noun is either masculine or feminine, so
things that would seem to lack gender to an English speaker are assigned
to one or the other class. In such languages, grammatical gender is
often more morphological - related to the sound of the word - than
semantic - related to its meaning. In Spanish, for example, words ending
in -o are typically masculine and words ending in -a are typically
feminine. One example of a word with grammatical gender that differs
from its natural gender is the German Maedchen, or "maiden," which is
grammatically classified as neuter rather than feminine."

Leonard

-----Original Message-----

> From: Dan Goldstein

> And then there are the genders assigned to inanimate objects: The
> monitor screen and mouse are male, the keyboard and printer 
> are female,
> etc.

It seems like the monitor should be female and the keyboard male, since
the
monitor receives data and the keyboard sends data.  Why aren't the
keyboard
and mouse the same gender?

Lauren


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