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

= October 2 =

Gender of rivers
Do rivers have a gender in English? I am referring especially to River Severn 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 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)


 * 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. --R ô tkæppchen68 11:45, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

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


 * This page on sw.wikipedia and 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 (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)