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true, but there its interesting as a way to understand a peoples concept. For exmple in german de sun is female and the moon male and kids draw them accordingly, while in portugese the sun is male and the moon female and when I changed culture, I suddenly found the moon to be a lot more gentle and the basic energy source to be a tipical male thing. I just never understood how they can perceive MILK as a MALE thing!? > >This is something most native speakers of English have a difficult time >dealing with in learning a new language. I remember my Latin teacher in >high school telling us "There's no logic behind it -- don't drive >yourselves >crazy trying to figure out why a dog is masculine and a cat is feminine, >or >why a door is feminine and a stone masculine -- just memorize the correct >word endings." Good advice, though it *did* bother me for a while. After >studying some modern languages I saw his point -- there really is no logic >or reason behind gender of words. I guess in English it's just one less >thing to worry about, which is fine, since our spelling baffles most new >learners (and many native speakers as well). I was surprised when >learning >Hindi to find that not only do objects (nouns) have different genders, but >the verbs used to speak about the actions these objects perform also >change >gender to match the object. Very intriguing. > >My apologies for being WAY OT -- ---> http://Matthias.Grob.org