"Language Is the Place from Where the World Is Seen"-On the Gender of Trees, Fruit Trees and Edible Fruits in Portuguese and in Other Latin-Derived Languages

Bibliographic Data

ID5901082
AuthorsLuís Dias (0000-0001-8536-3131), Luís Silva Dias (0000-0001-9313-6043, University of Évora, corresponding author), Alexandra Dias (0000-0002-9978-5375, University of Évora)
Year2017
Volume2
Issue3
Pages15
Publication date2017-08-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages2030015
OpenAlexW2752393948
LanguageEN
References cited18

Trees have always been important as natural entities carrying a strong symbolic and metaphorical weight, not to mention their practical uses. Therefore, words and their gender, used to name natural entities as important as trees and particularly fruit-trees and their fruits, are also important. Starting from the finding that Portuguese and Mirandese, the second official spoken language of Portugal, are Latin-derived languages in which 'tree' has feminine gender like it had in Latin, we investigated (1) the gender of 'tree' in Portuguese from the 10th to the 17th centuries sampling legal, literary, historical, scholar (mostly grammars and dictionaries), and religious manuscripts or printed sources; (2) the presumed variation in the gender of 'tree' during a short period in the 16th and 17th century; (3) the likely causes for that variation, which we found to be mostly due to typographic constraints and to compositors' errors; (4) the gender distribution of fruit trees and fruits produced by fruit trees in Latin and in twelve Latin-derived languages. Portuguese, together with the intimately related Mirandese and Barranquenho, forms a cluster distinct from all other Latin-derived languages in its use of the feminine in the names of fruit trees and fruits, and in the gender agreement between them

Combinatorics · Geography · Latin Americans · Linguistics · Portuguese · Tree (set theory · Variation (astronomy · Categorization, perception, and language · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy

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