User talk:Xideum

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Gender-shape correlation[edit]

Hi. About my user page on the correlation between shape and gender, you asked me why I chose three Romance languages. First of all, this whole story amounts to "original research" (although it was not my idea), so Wikipedia is not the place for it. But I found that out only afterwards. Anyway, I chose Romanian because this is the language I first found to show this correlation (and because it is my mother tongue). Then, as I could measure a significant correlation, I wanted to know if other Romance languages have it, becuase it is known (with very few people denying) that Romanian has its roots in Latin, so the other Romance languages should show the same characteristic. French has, however, a much less distinct correlation, so I thought they may have lost it in the latinisation process. Then I turned to Italian, as it probably preserves most of the Latin vocabulary, but again the correlation is very weak. In the meantime someone helped me with the Russian word list, and this is significant because there are many Slavic borrowings into Romanian. Still, the correlation is weak. Recently I tried Latin itself. I had fewer nouns in the list as there are many kinds of fruit and vegetables that appeared afterwards (tomato, potato, corn, etc.). The result is that if you consider neuter nouns in the feminine group you get a correlation as high as in Romanian, but taking neuter nouns as masculine gives a much smaller correlation (there are many neuter nouns in Latin and it changes everything). One more thing, I had to redefine the correlation formula more carefully. The previous formula allows for unrealistic results. Are you interested in this? --AdiJapan 02:50, 26 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

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I agree with you in most points. Well, I should say that all this correlation thing was more like a one-day experiment, so I used whatever I had at hand, and I only did the experiment because searching the internet for relevant information failed (with the notable exception of the Alamblak language).

I agree with you that going back to Latin and Sanskrit would be excellent. As I said, I tried Latin recently and it looks like you need to group neuter and feminine nouns together to get a good correlation. If I find a good [Whatever]-Sanskrit dictionary I will try Sanskrit too.

I disagree with you on one important aspect. It is not necessarily in the old languages that this correlation has its roots, although I agree that it would be somewhat more plausible. But I wouldn't neglect the possibility for modern humans to have their contribution, even in such an old invention as the language.

One more thing: Even if Latin did not show this correlation, it still is conceivable that some Romance languages have preserved various features from the substratum, and the gender-shape correlation could be one of them.