[Fictionary] SURRA results

[Pierre Abbat]

On Sunday, October 24, 2021 1:03:37 AM EDT Josh Smift wrote:
> Totally uninformed speculation: All four are from native languages, three
> happened to end in an "a" sound and one in an "o" sound; since in Spanish,
> feminine nouns often end in a, and masculine in o, they just ran with that.

Exactly. They're from Quechua. Some animal names come in masculine and 
feminine forms, which may or may not be related: el perro (dog), la perra; el 
caballo (horse, borrowed from Celtic), la yegua (from PIE). The basic 
hymenopteran words are feminine (abeja, avispa, hormiga), but Russian 
"муравей", which is cognate with "hormiga", is masculine, even though most 
ants are female. Latin "rattus", which is masculine, turned into feminine 
"rata", even when referring to a male rat; "rato" means "while" (the sense 
"male rat" is archaic). If the word for an animal exists in only one gender, 
one adds "macho" or "hembra" for the other.

Pierre
-- 
li ze te'a ci vu'u ci bi'e te'a mu du
li ci su'i ze te'a mu bi'e vu'u ci