Der Hahn, die Henne, das Huhn....

[Harding, George E.]

JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:

>>While we're speaking of animals: An interesting fact
>>about animal names in Tokana is that they all refer
>>specifically to the female of the species.

To which someone replied:

>So, how do you express non-gender specific words, as in
>"chicken" as opposed to "hen" or "rooster"?

Probably the same way we do in English. How do we express "hen" or
"rooster" as "opposed to" the generic "chicken"? Unless we're being
specific, e.g., the story of the "Little Red Hen" or about a specific
rooster, e.g., "Damned rooster, he crows every morning at six!" we tend to
refer to all three as "a," "the," or "it."

In German, as per the title, there are three gender designations which
follow biology for "rooster," "hen," and "chicken." However, other animals
tend to be grouped under varying genders. For example, unless specified,
"dog" tends to be masculine; "cat" tends to be feminine, etc. I suspect
that where a gender designation is important there is greater specificity.
This tends to be the case with farm animals, e.g., _der Bulle, der Stier_,
_die Kuh_, but _das Vieh_, or with "rooster," "hen," and "chicken." With
animals where gender significance is negligible, usually only one gender
exists, e.g., _der Fish_.

Eddy

[Mark E. Shoulson]

>Encoding: 30 TEXT
>Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 13:37:00 -0500
>From: "Harding, George E." <GHar...@ACS2.FMARION.EDU>

>
>In German, as per the title, there are three gender designations which
>follow biology for "rooster," "hen," and "chicken." However, other animals
>tend to be grouped under varying genders. For example, unless specified,
>"dog" tends to be masculine; "cat" tends to be feminine, etc. I suspect
>that where a gender designation is important there is greater specificity.
> This tends to be the case with farm animals, e.g., _der Bulle, der Stier_,
>_die Kuh_, but _das Vieh_, or with "rooster," "hen," and "chicken." With
>animals where gender significance is negligible, usually only one gender
>exists, e.g., _der Fish_.

Hebrew generally has masculine and feminine forms for its animals, usually
(but not always) related by simple addition of feminine
suffixes. kelev/kalbah, par/parah, tzvi/tzviah (but 'aryeh/l'vi'ah). I
can't quite imagine dag/*dagah (fish); there may be something special with
that. For that matter, d'vorah (bee) and n'malah (ant) are feminine; I
can't think of masculine forms for them. When there are two forms, I think
the masculine is usually used for the generic case.

IIRC, Welsh has gender that inheres to the animal name and can't always be
altered by affixes (Welsh masc and fem don't have the structural
distinction like you see in most Hebrew words). You can do llew/llewes
(lion/ess), but "cath"/cat is just plain feminine; you need to say
something like "gwrcath"/malecat to get a masculine one.

~mark