I wonder, why Germans call their homeland - Fatherland and Russians call their homeland - Mother Russia. In English it calls just - Homeland. Any guesses?
IMO, while I'll reserve right to be completely wrong , Germans maybe (?) call their homeland-Fatherland because of the patrilineage importance while back (like one big family name) and Russians-Mother, probably 'cause word Russia is a feminine noun (I've few more ideas about the last but I wish to hear other posters as well).
I was also considering the gender roots of this. In Russian "Russia" has female gender this why it can not be Father. But as I know German language has no genders so the word "land" shouldn't be a male gender. May be we need someone German here to explain it
Hmmmm... German Gender Hints When to use der, die, das Nouns and Gender in German Most world languages have nouns that are either masculine or feminine. German, besides capitalizing all nouns, goes them one better and adds a third gender: neuter. The masculine definite article (the) is der, feminine is die, and neuter is das. German-speakers just seem to know whether Wagen (car) is der or die or das. (It's der Wagen.) And they also know that the other German word for car is das Auto. But when referring to cars by brand name, it's always der Ford, der VW or der Mercedes. http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa042098.htm Is it der, die, or das Deutschland? Normally it has no article, but it is a neuter, because of "-land" at the end. Other countries (except the ones on "-ei" (female), also others which have "die" in front of them) follow suit. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100419091300AAOQYgb Now, go figure... I'll stick with my initial guess of patrilineage importance...
