Chapter 4 of Ó Siadhail's Learning Irish says:

quote:

Nouns describing males ... and occupations originally associated with mails ... are all masculine.

Nouns describing females ... are almost all feminine.

[Emphasis mine.] Sometime in the last 90 days, which is about how long I've been studying Irish, I came across something that explained why cailin (girl) fit in the 'almost' category. That is, it's a noun describing a female, but it's masculine. The explanation said something about what/where the word came from, and I think (but am not sure) it may have said the -ín did not mean 'little' in this case.

Problem is, I have no idea where I saw it. Could have been here. Could have been another forum. Could have been a book. Can anybody elucidate?

I believe I've read (probably here) that the word was originally of neuter gender, and neuter words switched to masculine as the language evolved.

The -ín in cailín does mean "little." The root word, caile, is feminine (and fairly archaic now, although it lives on in another word for "girl", gearrchaile.)

There are a handful of other cases though where -ín is not a diminutive (e.g. coinín, gairdín) - perhaps you were thinking of one of those?

Thanks for your answers. The explanation I was referring to definitely said cailin derived from a word which was masculine (which explained why cailin itself is masculine). So I guess I'll wait for a few more responses.

All Irish words with the diminutive ending -ín are masculine, just as all words with the abstract noun ending (-e)acht are feminine. That's how grammatical gender works: it's closely correlated with morphology, and only loosely with meaning.

There's an exact parallel, incidentally, in the Germanic languages, where (historically at least) all diminutives were grammatically neuter. As Mark Twain once mordantly remarked, "In German, a young lady has no sex but a turnip does." He was referring to the fact that the word for "young lady", Fräulein, is grammatically neuter. That's due to the presence of the diminutive ending -lein; a corresponding Herrlein "little mister" would be neuter as well. Mädchen, the usual Standard German word for "girl", is in origin a diminutive of Magd "maid" and so it's neuter; the exact same holds for Dutch meidje.

(It's possible that diminutive endings are ultimately related--Irish -ín and proto-Germanic -īn, which underlies the ending -lein, could be etymologically identical. But I don't know enough about the prehistory of Irish to say for sure.)

quote:

All Irish words with the diminutive ending -ín are masculine, just as all words with the abstract noun ending (-e)acht are feminine

not quite "all".

~ín words are masculine; bróigín beag dubh (masculine, 4ú Díoclaonadh) but bróg bheag dhubh (feminine, an dara díoclaonadh)

Only words of more than one syllable ending in (-e)acht or ~íocht) are feminine. Gaeltacht, litríocht, galamaisíocht srl

Words of one syllable ending in (-e)acht are masculine: acht, racht, reacht, leacht, srl

Finally remembered the counterexample I was trying to think of earlier!

Coinín and gairdín aren't actually diminutives, but they look and behave just like diminutives (masculine, genitive identical to nominative.)

Muinín, though, is feminine (genitive muiníne.)

I'm also told that an bheainín, 'the little woman', is feminine.

But I got it from someone's internet site (here), and though he says he got it from Dinneen's Concise English-Irish Dictionary, 1912, I haven't got that one, so I can't check it. Certainly, beainín is not listed in anything I do have access to.

quote:

~ín words are masculine; bróigín beag dubh (masculine, 4ú Díoclaonadh) but bróg bheag dhubh (feminine, an dara díoclaonadh)

Ní thuigim, a Thaidhgín. How is that different from what I just said?

quote:

Only words of more than one syllable ending in (-e)acht or ~íocht) are feminine. Gaeltacht, litríocht, galamaisíocht srl

Words of one syllable ending in (-e)acht are masculine: acht, racht, reacht, leacht, srl

But I didn't say "all words ending in -(e)acht, I said "all words with the abstract noun ending (-e)acht are feminine". The words you list don't have this ending; the -(e)acht element in them is part of the noun stem.

Now I must barge in with a side question.

Is there anything common to Russian kalin(ka) (sp?) and Irish cailín? Are they, again, just words that look and sound similar by chance?

Out of just about everything, I forgot to discuss this when I had the chance to chat with "cailín Úcraineach (sp?) darb ainm Kalinka".

Abigail,Coinín and Gairdín are both loan words from French? Don't know why that should make them exceptions tho'.No legends about rabbits,you know,only hares - rabbits are blow-ins!

Well, just that the ín at the end is not a masculine diminutive suffix, but an integral part of the word, with no particular effect on its gender any more than the ís at the end of coicís has.

That's why muinín is a better example - because it shows that the "-ín = masculine" rule does not apply when ín isn't a suffix.
(It's not an exception to the rule, just an example of what the rule is, to help avoid overgeneralizing to what it isn't.)

Mar a deir Macdara, tháinig an coinín leis na Normannaigh.

Tarlaíonn sé go ndeachaigh an focal chéanna isteach sa Ghearmáinis. Seo atá le rá ag an Duden Herkunftswörterbuch faoi:

Der Name (Kaninchen) des Hasentieres ist eine Verkleinerungsbildung zu Kanin(Kaninchen; Kaninchenfell), das seinerseits über gleichbed. mnd. kanin auf afrz conin zurückgeht.

(Tá níos mó ann, is as cuniculus na Laidine a tháinig conin, agus ceaptar gurbh as iberís a fuair an Laidin é.

quote:

Is there anything common to Russian kalin(ka) (sp?) and Irish cailín?

What do you mean by this? As far as I know, калинка means "the little berry of the snowball tree" (viburnum opulus). It is cognate for example with German "Holunder"

Cailín is cognate with Greek παλλακή and Latin pellex, which is a kept mistress, a concubine.

So, no etymological connection, as it would seem.

But you know, "Is an cheist bhalbh amháin an cheist neamh-fhiafraithe." Or something like that.

quote:

All Irish words with the diminutive ending -ín are masculine, just as all words with the abstract noun ending (-e)acht are feminine.

Niet : muinín, f
fuacht, m

Coinín doesn't come from French (coinín in French : lapin).

A Lughaidh, as explained before, muinín does not contain a diminutive. The Old Irish form is muinigin (cf. Gaelic muinighin), so the apparent -ín suffix is really part of the root.

Same goes for fuacht. The ultimate root here is is *aug- which when compounded with the PIE nominal suffix *to- yields *aukto- > PC *ouxto > OIr. ócht, uacht. Any resemblance to a reflex of the element *-axtā is strictly coincidental.

Obviously, a beginner can't be expected to know the history of every vocabulary word dating back to Proto-Indo-European, so for their purposes the "words of more than one syllable" guideline is doubtless of more practical use.

quote:

Coinín doesn't come from French (coinín in French : lapin).

Not from Modern French, but from Norman French.

Féach thuas: is ionann afz agus sean Fhraincís.

http://www.daltai.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/daltai/discus/show.pl?tpc=20&post=83191#PO ST83191

Stail: the word for a stallion is also a feminine noun. Is it correct to say that in grammar the gender of a noun has to do with its spelling rather than what it actually means?

fear eile

That would be why they call it grammatical gender.

To be a little more precise, it's to do with how the genitive relates to the nominative (rather than just the spelling of the nominative itself.)

quote:

A Lughaidh, as explained before, muinín does not contain a diminutive. The Old Irish form is muinigin (cf. Gaelic muinighin), so the apparent -ín suffix is really part of the root.

I know, I just answered to the person who wrote : ending in -ín = masculine.

quote:

Obviously, a beginner can't be expected to know the history of every vocabulary word dating back to Proto-Indo-European, so for their purposes the "words of more than one syllable" guideline is doubtless of more practical use.

Yes. Anyway it's easier to learn the gender of the nouns by heart, than to learn the etymology of every word :-)

I read today: "Cailín, a girl, is masculine, i.e., it undergoes the same initial changes as a masculine noun, but the pronoun referring to it is feminine. Is breá an cailín í (not é)."

Yes, pronouns follow actual rather than grammatical gender.

quote:

Yes, pronouns follow actual rather than grammatical gender.

For animate humans, at least. With animals, grammatical gender is the rule unless they are explicitly qualified, e.g. madra baineann "female dog" would be referred to with sí even though madra is otherwise a fourth-declension masculine noun.

And then (as long as we're not worried about frightening away the newcomers) there's also the so-called "feminine of reference", by which is meant the use of feminine pronouns to refer back to grammatically masculine non-human nouns such as capall "horse" (even in reference to stallions[*]!) and leabhar "book". Even my hard-won mastery of the famously arbitrary gender system of German never prepared me for that!


[*] The word for "stallion", stail, is, of course, grammatically feminine. Tá an-bhrón orm, a Phéileacán, but it's too late to give up now!