Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 October 2

Do rivers have a gender in English? I am referring especially to River Severn#Literary and musical allusions where the Nile and the Severn seem to be male. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 11:32, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

:The Thames is sometimes characterized as 'Old Father Thames', of course. Not a reliable source, but there's an interesting blog on the subject of rivers and gender at [http://www.mysanantonio.com/life/travel/article/How-rivers-get-a-gender-attached-to-them-3919983.php] JezGrove (talk) 11:58, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

::See also Ol' Man River. But such genders are limited to the literary/poetic register; in everyday speech, rivers are impersonal and neuter (it). StevenJ81 (talk) 15:06, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

:{{ec}} I don't think rivers are gendered in English in any formal grammatical sense. They're certainly not morphologically marked. But we do have e.g. Old man river for the Mississippi. There's also Queen_of_the_Mississippi_(ship), which sort of implies that the Mississippi is a populace or a country that can have a queen. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:07, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

:Contrast Anna Livia, female personification of the River Liffey in Dublin. jnestorius^(talk) 17:04, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

:::The Danube does. In Germany and Austria she is female, in Croatia and Serbia he is male. --Rôtkæppchen68 11:45, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Does Swahili have a word for "freckles"? Khemehekis (talk) 22:58, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

:This page on sw.wikipedia and [http://www.graduates.com/Forum/Comments/266194 this forum] suggest "madoa ya kizungu"

:"doa" = "spot", "madoa" is plural (see Swahili noun classes) >> "spots of the aimless wanderers"? See mzungu. ---Sluzzelin talk 23:34, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

::IsiZulu is not closely related to kiSwahili within the Bantu languages, but it does use a word ([https://isizulu.net/?icashazi icasazi/amacashazi]) of the same noun class as Swahili, and the word does mean spot as well as freckle. μηδείς (talk) 01:06, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

::Thanks, Sluzzelin! Khemehekis (talk) 02:09, 5 October 2015 (UTC)