There should be no prolonged surprises over grammatical and biological gender. Confusion arises with the very word gender which means both genre/category and sexual orientation. Sadly, we are stuck with grammatical labels such as masc./fem./neut. Often lacking any biological correlations. Likewise, masc. and fem. rhymes.
In German, the little maid (das Mädchen) is grammatically neuter (because of the –chen!), although that did not protect Lolita from you-know-whom!
In many languages, as Jansy notes, grammar reverses (one is tempted to say perversely) the naughty body parts’ natural biological gender: in French, it’s la pine and le con. Don’t ask why. Nobody knows. Nobody knows why some languages manage with NO grammatical genders, while others have two, three or over a hundred.
And even with inanimate objects, gender-confusion reigns. Poets often endow the Sun and Moon with biological genders based on their particular native tongue’s grammar. Yet the ‘feminine’ Moon in Russian and most Romance languages, turns up ‘masculine’ in German. The ‘neuter’ Russian Sun is ‘masculine’ in Romance, but ‘feminine’ in German.
Another challenge for the translators?
Speaking of which, Jannsy may not know that Russian krasny (red) is also used colloquially and poetically to mean beautiful.
To end with a joke:
Aerlingus: having oral sex during a flight to Dublin.
Stan Kelly-Bootle (also known as the Cunning Linguist)
On 18/07/2011 13:43, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
A.Sklyarenko: (see also my articles "ПОЛУЧИТ ЛИ БАБУШКА РОЖДЕСТВЕНСКУЮ ОТКРЫТКУ, ИЛИ ОТЧЕГО ЗАГОРЕЛСЯ БАРОНСКИЙ АМБАР В «АДЕ»?" and "NABOKOV’S ANTHROPOMORPHIC ZOO: THE LEPORINE FAMILY OF DOCTORS IN ADA" available in Zembla). 'Cunilingus' comes from cunnus and lingua and has nothing to do with rabbits or doctors.
JM: So we should rule out Condor as suggestive of a "golden cunnus," and stick to doctors, hares and rabbits.
btw: After soberly writing down "cunnus," I decided to check on its gender (it sounded very masculine!).
Wikipedia on "Latin Profanity" brought me various surprises. For example, "mentula" (little mind) and variations on the origins of Ada's wordplay with "on the verge." I always thought that "a mind of its own" was the title of a book by David M. Friedman and its use kinda metaphorical.
The answer I was looking for appeared right in the end of the entry " In the Romance Languages" Congs to the Portuguese... A quote from Cicero's letters was exceedingly instructive, too.
Etymology
Cunnus has a distinguished Indo-European lineage. It is cognate with Persian kun "anus" and kos "vulva", and with Greek κύσθος (kusthos). Tucker relates it to Indo-European *kut-nos, which suggests a word meaning "split" (cf. English crack). The Indo-European origin of this word is supported by the fact that it appears in the Slavic languages, as in the Czech kunda also Persian gosha "splitting" and kos "vulva".[citation needed]
Eric Partridge's Origins, by contrast, relates it to a reconstructed IE *kuzdhos, and also calls attention to the Hittite kun, "tail", and suggests cognates among the Afro-Asiatic languages.
Usage
Cicero's letters[citation needed] confirm once again its obscene status. Cicero writes:
. . . cum autem nobis non dicitur, sed nobiscum? quia si ita diceretur, obscaenius concurrerent litterae.
("We don't say cum nobis ["with us"], but rather nobiscum; if we said it the other way, the letters would run together in a rather obscene way.")
Because the /m/ of cum assimilates to the /n/ of nobis, and because the accent was weaker in Latin than in English, cum nobis (although stressed on the middle syllable) sounds very similar to cunno bis (stressed on the first syllable), meaning "in/from/with a cunt twice".
Synonyms and metaphors
These include sinus, "indentation", and fossa, "ditch".
The modern scientific or polite words vulva and vagina both stem from Latin, but originally they had different meanings. The word vagina is the Latin word for scabbard or sword-sheath.
Vulva (or volva) signifed the uterus. The meanings of vagina and vulva have changed by means of metaphor and metonymy, respectively.
In the Romance languages
Cunnus is preserved in almost every Romance language: e.g. French con, Catalan cony, Spanish coño, Galician cona, Portuguese cona, (South) Sardinian cunnu, Old Italian cunna. In Calabrian dialects the forms cunnu (m.) and cunna (f.) are used as synonyms of "stupid, dumb". In Portuguese it has been transferred to the feminine gender; the form cunna is also attested in Pompeian graffiti and in some late Latin texts.