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I thought the discussion about gender was interesting. When I took Latin
here at Baylor, it was my understanding that the gender of the nouns was
determined by whether or not the noun was considered
masculine or feminine. For example, the feminine word "navis" means
"ship" and ships are always referred to as "she" or "her." The masculine
word "miles" means soldier, obviously males at that time. Most of the
replies to that message indicated that the gender of French, German, &
Italian words had nothing to do with the concepts of male or female, but
I believe they did.