... lost their original force as feminines. The old masculine answering to spinster was spinner; but spinster has now no connection with it. The foreign suffixes are of two kinds:— Foreign suffixes. ... inanimate things are spoken of, these languages are totally unlike our own in determining the gender of words. For instance: in Latin, hortus (garden) is masculine, mensa (table) is feminine, corpus ... living beings whose sex cannot be determined. 27.The inflections for gender belong, of course, only to masculine and feminine nouns. Forms would be a more accurate word than inflections, since...