Why in romance languages does the letter a represent femininity and the letter o masculinity?
In:
It ultimately comes from Latin, where many feminine nouns and adjectives end in -a in the nominative, dative and ablative case, while many masculine ones end in -us in the nominative and -o in the dative and ablative.
I don’t know how Latin got it, but ultimately no one knows how all human language ultimately comes from.
Most languages take things from a common source, so I guess the “-a” and “-o” rule was just adopted by many “romance” languages.
I don’t think it applies to every romance language though ? For example in french, I think the letter commonsly associated with the feminine form is “e”. To use an adjective in its feminine form you more or less just add an -e at the end (and then often don’t even pronounce it but whatever).
Ultimately from Proto-Indo-European, from which all Indo-European languages descend, with a shit-ton of detours over the past 6,000 years.
PIE’s nouns largely ended in **o**, later morphing into other endings… i, u, a, e. Sanskrit’s masc. nominative case ending in **a** (pronounced “uh” like “**a**bout”) is the largest class because it includes the former **o** endings from PIE, which became **a**. The feminine ends in **ā** (pronounced “aah” like “f**a**ther”), among some other endings.
So at some point in the past 6,000 years noun endings other than **o** broke away. Maybe it was just a quirk or dumb luck that the masc. nouns kept the **o** ending, and feminine and neuter changed. No way to really know because there are no written records of PIE. Its daughter languages have gone bat-shit crazy with nominal endings… Italian has feminine ending in **o** and **ù** (la mano, the hand), la virtù (virtue), for example, as well as **o** for masc. And not to mention English which has lost almost all case endings and grammatical gender.
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