My latin teacher often talked about such things, e.g. it's rather funny that sun and moon have exactly the opposite gender than in latin - while it's easy to guess why the latin moon is female and their sun is male, it's probably hard to understand why we switched the roles.
I always tend to think of the sun as male and the moon as female, but that's mostly down to Lewis Carroll, rather than grammatical gender. (though now that I'm learning French it does help remember the latter in that language)
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"
Fun fact: While the German "Fenster" originates from the latin "fenestra", the English "window" actually originates from the German "Windauge" (wind eye - 2k years ago the German tribes had no glass for their round windows, so the wind always blew through)
Interesting.
One of the things that stuck me as funny while leaning French is that le garage is masculine, while la voiture (the car) is feminine. It struck me that that particular pair would make more sense if the genders were the other way around. ;-)
-Neelix
