dumb blondes and blond beasts
никогда не был уверен, как правильно пишется по-английски: blond или blonde... Оказалось: и так, и этак:
"Blond" and "blonde", with its continued gender-varied usage, is one of few adjectives in written English to retain separate masculine and feminine grammatical genders. Each of the two forms, however, is pronounced the same way. (вики)
Те же "французские" правила что и для fiancé / fiancée.
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Еще интересный сюжетик на сродственную тему, про слова, которые грамматически одного рода, а по смыслу - другого:
The grammatical gender of a word does not always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (maidservant; archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun class.
[...]
A few more examples:
- Old English had two common words for "woman": þat wīf (neuter) and se wīfmann (masculine). (These words are the origins, respectively, of modern "wife" and "woman".)
- French le vagin (vagina) is masculine.
- German die Frau (feminine) and das Weib (neuter) both mean "the woman", though the latter is considered archaic for most purposes (although some people may use mein Weib in a jocular fashion in non-formal contexts, and Weiber is still used sometimes with a derogatory meaning).
- Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine.
- Scottish Gaelic boireannach "woman" is masculine.
- Slovenian dekle "girl" is neuter, while its cognate dekla "maidservant" is feminine.
- Swedish människa "human" is feminine; in proper Swedish the feminine pronoun is used to refer to människa regardless of natural gender, although this usage may sound overly formal today.
- Spanish la gente "the people" is feminine, even if the collective term refers to a group of men. Also, several alternative words for "penis" have feminine gender, despite the organ being a distinguishing feature of male animals. (вики)
А в русском языке есть такие слова?