Far too late!

March 16, 2008 · Filed Under Me · 3 Comments 

I should be in bed, but I’ve been exchanging emails with an American web entrepreneur who is coming over to Milan shortly, and thinking about how I’m going to have a go at helping out an interesting German sculptor, one Jochen Kitzbihler, who is a friend of Gianpietro Carlesso’s, incidentally.

Very interesting times. Life sure is moving me in some fascinating directions at the moment!

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A Curious Inconsistency

March 2, 2008 · Filed Under Language · 6 Comments 

Don’t ask me why my odd little mind ended up considering this, but the fact remains that in Italian the word ‘giorno’ - day, is a ‘male’ word, whereas the word for week - ’settimana’ is female.

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why this is the case.

Italian is one of those languages, that, unlike English, defines everything as being either male or female, from a grammatical point of view. Sometimes you can guess that a word will be either female or male, other times, as in the day/week thing, there appears to be no logical explanation or consistency.

Oh well, English has its notoriously devious spelling that bears little relation to pronunciation and Italian likes to catch you out with its odd male and female nouns.

No language is perfect. And before anyone points this out, I know that German nouns defy any reasonable explanation, especially with regard to the neuter gender that is assigned to some words.

Curious, very curious.

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