Irregularity in Latin: gender and inflexional classes

The Author searches the Latin common nouns beginning with the letters from a- to i- in order to have a statistical datum of the frequency of grammatical genders and inflexional classes. Then, analysing the masculine nouns in –a and the feminine ones in –o, that appear exceptions to the normal trends of the gender assignment, she notices that the masculine in –a, which are complex words, constitute a productive class whereas the feminine in –o are weak and subject to change of gender and declensional class. Finally, she shows that compound or derivative words are more numerous than the simplex ones and concludes that the selection of gender is generally arbitrary but it often depends on the mechanism of compounding or suffixation.