Words about sex and gender, part 12: Eng. feminine ~ Sp. femenino/a

 [This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]

Eng. feminine ~ Sp. femenino/a

Let us end this section by discussing the cognates Eng. feminine ~ Sp. femenino/a. These adjectives are the antonyms of the adjectives Eng. masculine ~ Sp. masculino that we discussed in the preceding section. They are loanwords from Lat. fēmĭnīnus/a, a term used in grammar with the sense ‘of the feminine gender, feminine’ (L&S). This adjective is derived from the noun femina we have seen and the adjective-forming suffix ‑īn‑ (see above).

fēmĭn-(a)			‘noun woman, female’
fēmĭn-	+‑īn‑(us/a)	fēmĭnīnus/a	‘adj. womanly, feminine’

English borrowed feminine from French, which borrowed it from Latin first, in the 12th century, mostly with the grammatical sense but also with the sense ‘womanly’, ‘having the character of a woman’. Eng. feminine [ˈfɛmənən] is first attested in English in the late 14th century. Originally it only had the grammar sense but by the 15th century it is attested with the sense ‘belonging to the female sex; female’, which is nowadays conveyed mostly by the adjective female (OED). Its main current senses are (1) ‘of or relating to women or girls’ and (2) ‘characterized by or possessing qualities traditionally attributed to women, such as demureness’ (AHD). These senses were acquired later, in the 17th century, and they were borrowed from French, which developed them first. The second of these senses, which refers to female behavior stereotypes, the ‘stereotypically female’ sense, is arguably the main sense of this English word in most contexts, with there being far fewer contexts in which the word is used with the ‘female’ sense.

Sp. femenino is first attested in the 15th century, originally as feminino/a, with an i in the second syllable, as in the Latin original, also with the grammatical sense. Later, no doubt under the influence of French, it replaced more native words such as femenil and mujeril with the non-grammatical, ‘feminine’ senses it has today. These senses were borrowed from its French cognate, much as in the case of its English cognate feminine. Although, Spanish femenino/a also has the same two main senses as Eng. feminine discussed in the previous paragraph, it would seem that Spanish uses this word which the ‘female’ sense than English does with its cognate. So, for instance, in Spanish we talk of fútbol femenino to refer to women’s soccer. Note that a literal translation into English as feminine soccer would be quite odd and would probably be interpreted as ‘soccer played in a stereotypically female way’, perhaps as soccer played daintily. In other words, Sp. femenino/a is not used in exactly the same way as Eng. feminine and thus the two cognates are only partial semantic ‘friends’. After all, we have learned that cognates rarely have totally identical meanings, and thus we find a full range from ‘good friends’ (close to identical meaning and usage) to ‘false friends’ (misleading cognates since the meanings differ a great deal; cf. Part I, Chapter 1).

THE END