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Sorry to drag this thread back to life, but does anyone remember the "Sailing on the Accountant Sea" sketch in the Monty Python movie "The Meaning of Life"? In that case, perhaps Fiberbabe meant "condottieri", who were the leaders of mercenary armies in Italy a few centuries ago? Seems appropriate!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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conditorei, which (when spelled correctly, which I probably haven't been able to pull off) means bakery/cake pastry shop in... um... German?
Very close Fiberbabe. I had to look it up to check the endings (and why is the confectionor masculine and the cakes feminine?)
Konditor m -s,-en confectioner. Konditor-ei f -,-en patisserie.
Rod
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does anyone remember the "Sailing on the Accountant Sea" sketch in the Monty Python movie "The Meaning of Life"?
Oh yes, a delightfully blood thirsty sketch, or rather it's almost a whole separate 30 (??) minute film which leads up to "The Meaning of Life". The whole lot gets shown about once a year on BBC.
Rod
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German gender
The reasons why words take the gender they do, in German or any other language with grammatical gender, is a mystery to me and, I suspect, to everyone else. There are a few formal rules in German, like the fact that any word with a diminutive suffix is neuter and hence, Fraülein, Mädchen, and Bübchen (young woman, girl, little boy) are all neuter and, structly speaking, if substituted by a pronoun should be referred to as "it". Different languages don't even go by the same rules. While "sun" is masculine and "moon" is feminine in the Romance languages, it's the reverse in German. Go figure. Maybe someone (Nicholas, are you there?) can shed some light or point to a site for info. on this question.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Originally gender had nothing to do with sex. How they came to be equated is beyond me. In some languages today they have no relation whatsoever. Trying to equate gender with sex would be as ludicrous as trying to relate color to shape. All balls must be red just because pomegranates are? Leaves are green so all flat objects must be? What planet are you from?
Besides, in modern English babies are neuter. "Oooh, it's sooo cute! Is it a boy or a girl?"
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but gender of nouns does allow some humour. An Englishman eating a meal in Paris exclaims in his execrable French, "Garcon, il y a un mouche dans ma soupe!" "Non monsieur, c'est UNE mouche" "Goodness me, what good eyesight you've got!" and to stress the importance of getting it right, my wife's (Swiss) great-aunt taught me this question: Which is correct; "Je n'ai pas lavé ma cuillère" or "Je n'ai pas lavé mon cuillère"? The second sounds like "mon cul hier". English translations: "I have not washed my spoon" and "I did not wash my bum [ass] yesterday"  . I might add that that was probably the cleanest French the Great Aunt taught me! Rod
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