I’m not sure I agree here. How was the gym? It was ok/good
Splitting hairs really. I have had that conversation.
Yeah, either sound natural to me, for what that’s worth.
I’ve had that conversation too- especially when making a nice game pie.
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That sounds painful!
That’s it- abstract rather than unspecific. Weather is the most obvious and commonly used one to be feminine.
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there’s about a 2:1split in favour of male nouns.
Anyone could get a hit rate of greater than 80% quite quickly. just by guessing male and knowing the weather
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Centuries of male dominance, especially in writing and especially in Rome. Even in Britain, in the past, women took male pen-names to get published or to avoid notoriety. Result - anything fractious or annoying was female and everything else was male! I have noticed that men refer to their cars and boats as ‘she’ .Our first family car was a 1936 Morris 8, purchased in 1952. ‘He’ had been registered in Hull and was CAT. Our cat, mentioned elsewhere, was a very fearsome ex-Tom, very certainly ‘he’, so I naturally thought of CAT as ‘he’ and thought my dad calling him ‘she’ was very weird!
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Generally true of course, but both all the early Celts and the later Welsh (eg laws of Hywel Dda) seem to have had a comparatively high regard for treating women comparatively equally.
I think you would have to look elsewhere for any reason for the split to be different to that in other languages.
I am getting at the fact that Cymraeg was influenced by Latin and this was particularly true of writing. It was a while before anything got written in anything but Latin and the Church got involved with the whole job of writing things down. I suspect that even the early church was pretty male-centred and we know it was brought to Britain and spread by the Romans! Of course the Iceni ‘rebellion’ was caused by Rome’s total inability to understand the rights and status of a Queen in Britain, but that got put down pretty effectively in the end.
The best part of 400 years does affect a language, I think, if less so when most people can read…mmm… how long since American movies started over here? My mam remembered the first talkies!! Infuence? I would say so!
or maybe men are more likely to refer to things as she and women to things as he. I had two brothers and our cars were she, but my wife had two sisters and thejr cars are all given male names.
If women talk more than men and i think that’s probably true, then more words would be male?
I’ve put my tin hat on now in case I’ve just crossed the line and come across sexist.
parts of the face tend to be female though which is interesting, perhaps it is down to describing beauty and female appearance?
Absolutely, but it seems (at least, from the link given) that Welsh is unusually skewed towards using Masculine rather than feminine nouns. More so than romance languages (again, just going by the above link) To me, this suggests that influence from Latin is not the reason.
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I would maintain that we are all sexist and cannot help but be, because we all live in, to a certain extent, a solipsistic universe and can only imagine roughly what it is like to be someone else. Being the other sex - well transexuals are very aware of what they are not, I understand, most of us only know one view and find it hard truly ro imagine the other! So you don’t need a hard hat, Bach!! Sympathy, yes!
In that case, doesn’t it show that Y Frenhines Iceni won the war, if not the battle!! The Romans brought ‘sexed’ nouns and we imprinted our views over them more effectively than most other parts of their Empire!! I am very encouraged!! I didn’t know those statistics! Oh, nasty thought… are all the female nouns things like cegin and male words associated with ‘men’s’ work?
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I don’t know any details, or how accurate the figures are, or how they relate to different kinds of nouns or how it relates to percentage of words used in speech etc. I know nothing. Just going by the above link 
But yes, even after the Romans, the laws of Hywel Dda seemed to regard women in a comparatively high status.
If there is an explanation needed, just a thought- a completely off the top of my head, made up thought.
Welsh seems (I know no other language!) to have comparatively few ‘markers’ for gender (compared to say French). Mutations don’t always “show up” depending on the first letter of words, the word for “the” is the same, etc.
If this is the case compared to other languages, then there might, even amongst native speakers, a comparatively large number of lesser used nouns where the speaker would not be entirely sure of the gender.
In this case, that might produce in the language a ‘default’ gender, in to which lesser used nouns or new nouns tend to drift.
Fifty fifty chance that default would be masculine!
How common and obvious the gender markers are in all the other languages in that link, and whether or how this affects the gender split in them though, I wouldn’t pretend to be even able to guess.
Just a bit of waffle and some idle thoughts!
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Army is feminine in most languages. So is “gym” in Welsh. So no I don’t think it follows that it’s to do with the 19th century concept of sphere of influence.
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“With the decay of the neuter gender, the above and other neuters passed almost without exception into the masculine, due largely to the similarity of declension between neuter and masculine nouns.”
Interesting passing comment from “Studies in Welsh Grammar and Philology” by S J Evans.
This would have had an effect to one degree or another on the balance.
There’s an echo in here…
I’ve noticed you seem to read the same useless stuff that I do!
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Yup, exactly.
Great minds think alike - and so do us idiots!
Most people don’t read the whole of a thread!
No one has the time or inclination to listen to all the ramblings of someone like me!
Oh God, not again! I studied philosophy for three years at university, and I’m sure I ended up more stupid than when I started.
(Well, it certainly felt that way!)
But I do like Dark Star -one of the best low budget sci-fi films ever made, in my opinion.
Co written by the same bloke who went on to write Alien - the gritty, “normal factory/workers/people in space” was common to them both, and very effective.
The “alien loose on ship causing havoc” was of course used by him in both, and nothing wrong with that
Amusing that in one, the alien loose on board ship has become the stuff of nightmares for an entire generation, whilst the other one was a low budget beachball sprayed with paint and gaining more sympathy than the people on the ship!
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Thanks for clip! Not seen before. It made me go back and find what I’d said about solipsism. Then I noticed that I’d mis-taken-in the message I was replying to!! I don’t know how I did it, but I thought it said we had more Feminine nouns and it actually said Masculine!! So everything I thought was wrong and all the statistics about drifts from neuter became more relevant.
Basically, I give up. Anyone’s guess is better than mine!
@owainlurch the above is for you too! Oh, and what do you do with a degree in Philosophy? Or was it PPE? In which case, you could be a rich Banker or a Politician!!
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It was PPE, and I am neither
My subsequent career(s) had no specific relation to the degree.
I’ve kept an interest in certain stuff, of course, but you could say that for any experiences in any period of your life.