Talk:curimã
Gender
[edit]@Jberkel, I did a thorough analysis of Google Books and Google Scholar hits and it is clear that, while feminine usage is much more widespread, masculine usage is:
- attested across many generations
- supported by some prescriptive works
- used by authors who seem to be familiar with the curimã (as opposed to, say, someone from far away talking about a fish they’ve never seen)
- attested in a variety of registers, from ichtyological publications to folklore and poetry
No evidence of this variation being tied to the sex of the fish, so I’m changing it to g1=f|g2=m rather than g=mf. In fact, if it were the latter, the masculine would account for the majority of uses.
I suspect that masculine used to be the standard and the feminine a little-publicised local variant. One of the prescriptive sources (from 1961) lists the word under “S.f. e m. (e não só m.)” (“Noun - feminine and masculine (and not just masculine)”); this wording suggests that masculine was the predominant gender among the target audience of prescriptive vocabularies. Another bit of evidence is that Aulete switched from m. to f. at some point, and that masculine seems to be more common that further back you go. — Ungoliant (falai) 22:13, 17 January 2022 (UTC)