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From online article "Nighttime lights linked to depression" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40242387/ns/health-mental_health"In people, loss of enjoyment is known as anhedonia and is a major symptom of depression." From http://www.etymonline.com/, the 3 parts of "anhedonia" are Greek. an- without hedone pleasure -ia to form an abstract feminine gender noun They have the actual word at that site, but it doesn't break out the -ia. Anyway, the article is intriguing, even if applying the results to humans seems a little premature.
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And our planet seen from space at night is well lit.
Curious thoughts result.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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Uh why is the 'ia' bit added on the end?
Does that mean only those of the female persuasion can get it?
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Does that mean only those of the female persuasion can get it?
I think the gender applies to the Greek grammar, not the English grammar. I don't think we have grammatical genders for English nouns. I reckon "-ia" is common usage among sesquipedalians. glossolalia (speaking in tongues) anosmia (loss of sense of smell) aphasia (loss of ability to speak) coprophagia (eating feces) dipsomania (alcoholism) Utopia (nowhere)
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We do have a few I think?
-or on some words indicates masculine gender and -ress indicates feminine. And I think he/she/it are gendered personal pronouns...although not sure if that is on or off topic!
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I'm a little fuzzy on genders. I agree there are gendered pronouns in English. Not so sure with nouns. I've always inferred that the actual gender of the object isn't always indicative of the grammatical gender.
For example, the Latin word "hasta" (spear) is feminine, instead of neuter. The German word "Madchen" (maiden) is neuter, instead of feminine.
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The German word Mädchen ("girl") is treated grammatically as neuter because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (maidservant; archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun. But that I know is definately off topic!
I am also not so good with the english gendered words...we seem to have changed them all to neuter or gotten rid of the altogether.
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-or on some words indicates masculine gender and -ress indicates feminine.
The English suffixes for agentive nouns , -or and -ess come, via French, from Latin. They replaced the native (Old) English suffixes, the feminine of which was -ster (as in the names Baxter '(woman) baker' and Brewster '(woman) brewer'.
The abstract noun suffix -[i]ia (from both Greek and Latin) is more like our -ness or -hood. The agentive noun suffixes mentioned as not really an example of gender in English. Except in the pronominal system, English has lost gender marked by inflection or class. In many languages related to English, such as Russian, German, Latin, and Greek, grammatical gender is still very much a living part of the grammar. All nouns and adjectives have gender, etc.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I've always inferred that the actual gender of the object isn't always indicative of the grammatical gender.
This is true, and I've mentioned it here and elsewhere. Gender was originally a grammatical term that became a sort of euphemism for biological sex. There are some languages, famously of the bantu family in Africa, that have upwards of 13 genders (though today they tend to be called noun classes because of the word gender's newer meanings).
the Latin word "hasta" (spear) is feminine, instead of neuter.
Yes, but it is good to remember that not all nouns that end in -a in Latin are of the feminine grammatical gender. Latin agricola 'farmer', nauta 'sailor', and poeta are all grammatically masculine. And, not all nouns which end in -us are masculine: e.g., corpus, corpora, 'body' and opus, opera, are neuter and manus 'hand' and foetus 'fetus' are feminine. This leads to some funny attempts (by folks with little Latin and less Greek) to replicate plurals in English with words borrowed from Latin, e.g., *opii as the plural of opus, virii as the plural of virus, etc. The last mentioned is particularly funny as virus 'poison' seems to have been a non-count noun in Latin and had no plural form.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Also the ever brilliant 'octopi' rather than the correct 'octopuses'. So would you say then that we have no gendered grammer or just neuter grammer if gendered at all?
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