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[From Spanish, contraction of hijo de algo (son of something).
This reminded me of the thread on whether no name is no name, or not. What I want to ask is whether the "something" in this def. is derogatory, or does it just indicate lack of knowledge? "Something" as in, 'I don't want to say the ugly word for his parent(s) so I'll use this word something'; or as in, 'He could be the son of a peasant or a king, for all I know'?
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This week's words in a nutshell: "Blimey, I prithee, willy-nilly hijo de hidalgo! Druthers you'd come home at last!"  but : 
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I believe it is the opposite of derogatory, actually, but includes a derogatory implication upon those who are not "hidalgo". Confused? LOL! Well, the "son of something" is as opposed to a "son of nothing", the "nothing" being the common people. Hence, it refers to nobility. It was probably a further shortening of a phrase, such as "hijo de algo importante". The word for someone is close, "alguien", and perhaps the original phrase used it, but phonemically it is very different. Phonemically "nothing" (nada) and "no one" (nadie) are much closer, but curiously, there is no word deriving from "son of nothing". Does that help? :0)
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This week's words in a nutshell: "Blimey, I prithee, willy-nilly hijo de hidalgo! Druthers you'd come home at last!" LOL! I thought about some of the words this week. Random thoughts: Prithee sounds like privy ;0)... Why not "willshe-nillshe"? These sexist languages...*sigh*
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Latin filius nullius 'son of nobody' is a legal term for an illegitimate son.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Not sure, zmjezhd, if you were responding to my post: there is no word deriving from "son of nothing" but I was actually making my statement within the context of my post, referring only to the lack of a "son of nothing" in Spanish, as I am well aware of my lack of familiarity with the hundreds of other languages on the planet! Do you know where this filius nullius is used? Thanks! :0)
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the lack of a "son of nothing" in Spanish
Yes, I took your word about that lack. Filius nullius is post-Classical. It's purely a legal term as far as I know.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Ha! willshe-nillshe be a filia nullia? Or willI-nillI?
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Why not "willshe-nillshe"? These sexist languages...*sigh* For what it's worth, when gender meant something in English the word from whence we got woman was masculine gender. Whether this meant that the masculine pronoun was used with it I wouldn't know. Modern German uses the sex-appropriate pronoun for any noun that refers to anything that has a sex regardless of its grammatical gender, but uses the grammatically appropriate pronoun for anything for which sex is irrelevant, e.g., der Wind is er, 'he' and die Fahne, 'flag' is sie, 'she.'
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As in modern French
le soleil a rendez-vous avec la lune,mais
le vent a rendez-vous avec le drapeau.
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genderIt's always a good idea not to confuse grammatical gender with the biological variety (aka noun classes, though I prefer the traditional term). Some languages have as many as a baker's dozen of genders, e.g., Kiswahili and its Bantu cousins ( link).
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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[The Ojibwe language and other members of the Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. All living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth are considered powerful and belong to the animate class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as "raspberry" is animate, but "strawberry" is inanimate.]
Tja, interesting , but nothing's perfect. Still is fun to observe.
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It's the same with gender in Spanish; dress is masculine, skirt feminine, shirt and blouse both feminine, as well as tie and jacket, trees are masculine, most words for car as well.. etc. etc.
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Yes, but I think zmjezhd pointed out that many words are not gender related and I mean; why would the sun be male and the moon be female? (Oh, blimmy , I think I got it). Are we that cold?
Anyway, lots of systems in other languages and also there no totally consequent systems. Spanish and French and Italian are
closely related and act mostly similar. Gee, what a relaxed weekend this is.
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why would the sun be male and the moon be female? (Oh, blimmy , I think I got it).
Except, in German: der Mond und die Sonne (masculine moon and feminine sun): something I always wanted to archetypically ask Dr Jung.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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why would the sun be male and the moon be female? (Oh, blimmy , I think I got it).
Except, in German: der Mond und die Sonne (masculine moon and feminine sun): something I always wanted to archetypically ask Dr Jung. Same in English back when gender meant something. The point is that gender, in general, has nothing to do with sex. It's only in a few languages that the two concepts have become conflated. In Modern English the concept of gender has pretty nmuch been lost completely. So much so that the word gender is used to mean 'sex,' as in male or female. The term sex is more often used to mean sexual intercourse.
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why would the sun be male and the moon be female? (Oh, blimmy , I think I got it).
Except, in German: der Mond und die Sonne (masculine moon and feminine sun): something I always wanted to archetypically ask Dr Jung. In Middle Earth also if my memory serves me correctly...
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Yes, that's right: (Brecht: 'und der Mond war ganz dünn wie ein Pfennig der schon abgegriffen ist'.) Could it loosely be traced back to a matriarchal system in the very old days in these regions? The sun being femenine? ( Very Wild Guess).
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Could it loosely be traced back to a matriarchal system in the very old days in these regions?Some comparative-historical linguists have theorized that Proto-Indo-European did not have a tripartite (masculine, feminine, neuter) grammatical gender system, but rather a dual one (animate, inanimate). It seems that the feminine gender developed from a reanalysis of the plural ending of inanimate nouns as an abstract and singular one: cf. Latin bonum 'good thing' and bona (earlier, literally 'good things', but later 'goods'; Greek also tends to use singular forms of verbs with neuter plural subjects. The German linguist Johannes Schmidt ( link) did some of the early work in his Die Pluralbildungen der indogermanischen Neutra (1889, link).
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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> It seems that the feminine gender developed from a reanalysis of the plural ending of inanimate nouns as an abstract and singular one: cf. Latin bonum 'good thing' and bona (earlier, literally 'good things', but later 'goods'; I could have known you answer a dumb question with a killer answer. 
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a killer answer
Remember, it's just a theory. But, thanks for the compliment.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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a killer answer
Remember, it's just a theory. But, thanks for the compliment.
Is it a theory or an hypothesis?
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Is it a theory or an hypothesis?
Not in the hard sciences sense, but in the linguistics sense.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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