I should say it is the same thing that i find it now at German , and feminine at french many times is masculine at German and so on

thats called : une ver vert dans une verre vert vers où ?

I think at some point you have to accept that humans are not particularly logical beings (in spite of what some people would like to think), and that things we invent, such as language, that evolve in an unplanned way are also fundamentally irrational. When learning a foreign language the odd features of that language are made obvious, but English is no better (just odd in other ways, for example the choice of particular prepositions to go with particular verbs for particular meanings).

The most important lesson I learned is that your average native speaker can cope with quite a bit of wrongness, and often will reply in a way that lets you figure out what you got wrong without actually overtly correcting you (eg "je voudrais un thingy" "oui, ici une thingy" -- result, I get thingy and I learn that thingy is feminine). It's far better to muddle through is broken French/German/Italian/whatever than give up and let them use their perfect English with you (unless it's your boss asking you to do something you don't want to, and you can get out of it by claiming you didn't understand).

Now, you guys are confusing two different things - grammatical gender and anthropomorphisation.

When you say that cars and ships are referred to as "she" in English, you're talking about anthropomorphsation, i.e. the attribution of human or human-like characteristics to an inanimate object.

This is usually unrelated to the grammatical gender of the object in question (although sometimes there is a correspondence, like "nave" - ship - in Italian).

But the two things (grammatical gender and anthropomorphisation) are not related, and this is more evident in those languages that use grammatical genders.

For example: "morte" (death) in Italian is, from a grammatical point of view, a feminine word. But the traditional personification has male attributes. The list is endless.

• Every noun belonged to one of three grammatical gender classes (masculine, feminine, or neuter).
• Within the noun phrase, determiners and adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun.
• The third person personal pronouns and Interrogative/relative pronouns were chosen according to grammatical gender.

[edit] Development of natural gender

Old English by the 11th century was beginning to replace grammatical gender with natural gender. Thirteenth-century Middle English retained grammatical gender, but was in transition to the loss of a gender system as indicated by the increasing use of the gender-neutral identifier þe (the or thee).[1] English lost gender classes because of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.[2] Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s.[1] Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender,[1] and Modern English has no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.[2]




Problem is, English was such a mixture of so many different languages and dialects- and had got so incredibly complicated that a great simplification was necessary. The declension system also disappeared, and was replaced with an incredible array of prepositions (still a nightmare for foreigners learning English). Phrasal verbs are a total nightmare too - look at the number of possibilities for the simple 'to put down'!

Not being pedantic here, but 'une ver' does not exist really. Do you mean 'un vers vert'?

It may not be a very scientific approach, but some people say that ships, boat and cars are feminine in English because, once you have one, you spend most of your money on accessories that are not really needed. May apply to computers too.

And cars? Most men I know give female names to their cars.

we named our car antonio and the navigation system is named regula.

he he - my SatNav is called Jane. Well, that is, until she becomes Paddy after my husband has had a little fiddle!

In Greek we have three

Yup, and you have the aorist, and that through all tenses and moods except present indicative. That's one of the biggest problems for poor foreigners having to learn Greek.

The annoying thing is, even pre-school Greeklets handle it hands down, while we poor xénoi have to rack our brains with every sentence.

Thats what i tell myself when im trying desperately to speak French (and failing miserably every time!)

Yup. Good reading about this is Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), by a local great linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Prague linguistic circle. He is not so popular anymore, but I enjoy reading his pondering on arbitrariness (with exceptions of interjections, onomatopoeia).

N. Chomsky. And loads of other notions, kids are not afraid to make mistakes, phonemic filter is weak still, things get imprinted in their minds before they have a chance to see a system in it and complicate it with obtuse analysis, like grown ups.

This is fun. I am not sure why the nag, though, since there are hyper flexive languages, French is still alright. Phonetics is difficult, though, for me. And subjunctive tenses which are quite unfamiliar to a Slav. I also like the anthropomorphisation, since it is mnemotechnic help, sort of. I am more likely to visualize animate object doing something and remembering the declensions and conjugations (even if logically, biologically in fact it should be inanimate), like in a cartoon, rather than all people and some animals being animate and most other things being inanimate, that does mnemotechnically nothing for me.

Absolutely i mean "une ver " , it is very small animal or lets say insect ..

So does size affect gender too?

No that is wrong it is the gender who affect the size as the very famous exemple that everyone aware of ...

Ooops- just checked and we were both wrong! As French is my MT, I suppose I am more wrong than you, lol.

Un ver is definitely masculine, but no 's' at the end. It is a worm or a larvae.

as FR " billingue " , i sould make this mistake as well , as it had been while when i heard it ,lets say when i was 10 years old !

but i think i still have chance to be correct if i mean only the feminine of the "Ver " or that will not work ?

let's make it more complicated:
un vers
pour un ver vert
dans mon verre vert

un vers = poetry verse
un ver= worm
un verre = glass
vert = green