Linguistic Madness

Читаю сейчас «Between You and Me» — размышления Мэри Норрис, корректора The New Yorker, о языке и грамматических правилах. Наткнулась на такой пассаж:

Later, when I studied Italian, I used free association as a mnemonic device, laboriously memorizing the gender of every word, one at a time. It was easy enough with the equivalents of our vocation words. In Italian, poetessa is not an insult; it is simply the feminine form of “poet,” as dottoressa, contessa, professoressa are feminine forms of “doctor,” “count,” “professor.” But the word bicchiere, say, meaning “glass”: how could I remember that it was masculine? Sounds like beaker, which reminds me of chemistry and of Louis Pasteur, a chemist, who was a man: ergo bicchiere was masculine. But sometimes the beaker would remind me of Madame Curie, also a chemist, who was a woman, and I’d get confused. For bottiglia, “bottle,” if the a at the end wasn’t enough to tell me it was feminine, I could think of a bottle of beer with the St. Pauli girl on it. Latte, “milk,” was masculine, which seemed counterintuitive, because it’s the woman who lactates. I fell back on my experience as a milkman: latte, masculine. Obviously, if you grow up in a gendered language, you digest these forms along with your mother’s (masculine) milk, and perhaps if I had been given Latin to play with as a child I’d have had an easier time with the concept of gender later in life.

Дорогая Мэри! Латынь, безусловно, облегчает изучение романских языков, но больше в плане общих корней и лексики. Но наличие родов в собственном языке никак не помогает понять их распределение в чужом. Бывают счастливые совпадения, которые могут усыпить бдительность, но потом в ваш уютный мир врываются das Mädchen, une table и il braccio.

P.S.: нет, у меня не поехала крыша, но автору я точно писать не буду, а поделиться праведным возмущением хочется.