Re: Introspective and reflective pandas

Arnold Zwicky wrote:
> in article <430b8e8a$0$3803$79c14f64@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> chris waigld <cwaigl@xxxxxxx> declares:
>
> >French tends to be very systematic about that[1]: things referred to
> >by proper names get their gender from the underlying concept.
>
> well, from the elided *noun*. concepts don't have grammatical
> genders.

Yes, my brain elided the elided noun. Or so. <hanging my head />

> > But the article would always be in lower case.
>
> >- "Comme hôtel, je te recommande le Reine Elizabeth."
>
> not, apparently, in canada. as far as i can see, all the websites
> have "Le".

Ah, a Pondian difference in French.

> >... There's a popular soft cheese here
> >called "la vache kiri" (play on "qui rit", "the laughing cow"), and
> >I'm hearing it referred to as feminine...
>
> interesting. back in the old days, in the u.s., this was marketed as
> "la vache qui rit". how much do we know about the history of the
> name? (several cheese sites list "La Vache Qui Rit" and "Kiri
> (cheese)" separately.)

I have to follow this up -- dang, I could have done this while grocery
shopping earlier.

I've never actually bought this brand. And obviously, it is marketed
under "... Qui Rit" at least in some places or for some of their
products. But most people I know refer to it as "Kiri" (should have
capitalized that in my earlier post). I've seen it like that on school
cafeteria menus, and just had a discussion online about "la nouvelle pub
Kiri" ("the new Kiri ads").

> zotling
>
> (as for german, note the contrast between Das Kawasaki and Die
> Kawasaki.)

Hum. I've never heard "das Kawasaki". And the first 100 GHits for this
search string have "Kawasaki" as a modifier (mostly, "das
Kawasaki-Syndrom", and the Anglo-hyphenated "das Kawasaki Racing Team",
"das Kawasaki Team", "das Kawasaki Feeling" ...). Motorbikes are
feminine in German, that's true. No idea if this comes from an
underlying "Maschine" (fem.) [1] or from "Honda", seen as the epitome of
motorbike-hood among the youngsters for a time, and maybe imagined as
feminine. In any case, there's no way to attribute a gender to
"Kawasaki" from the name alone. And it's also "die BMW" ("der BMW" is a
car), "die Harley-Davidson" etc.

[1] German is less systematic than French, and there may be many
overlapping origins for gender attribution. For example, "Feeling",
"Marketing" and other loans from English in /-ing/ are neuter. Loan
words ending in /-e/ and /-a/ tend to be feminine, even though they are,
say, masculine in the language they were borrowed from (German: "die
Garage"; French "le garage"). Or they take the gender of a
cognate/descendant of an earlier loan, for many people: "der Place de la
Concorde" (I say "die", but only since moving to France) vs. "la Place
de la Concorde" in French, because it's "der Platz" in German.

ChrisW
note: take your digicam to the supermarket next time

--
blog: http://serendipity.lascribe.net/
eggcorns: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/
.

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