Useful Gaelic word: bàta

bàta – boat

Although the word bàta looks boringly similar to its English counterpart, it actually includes a mini language lesson for true enthusiasts. Gaelic words have grammatical gender, just like in French, German or Russian, which means that some words are masculine and some are feminine, with no word for "it" in modern Gaelic. There is a convention in the language that the word bàta is masculine while at port or being built and feminine while at sea. Yes, it’s confusing. But the reason for this is that Gaelic used to class nouns into three genders and had a neuter gender for some nouns. Grammatically, neuter nouns were treated much like masculine nouns. Bàta was one of these words. As the neuter nouns concept fell out of use, many words – such as bàta – became feminine nouns, but were "stuck" in phrases which treated them as masculine words. And bàta is one such word.

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