When addressing someone with a term of endearment, should the gender of "my" match the word or the person? For example, when addressing a male as "my star", would you say Звездочка моя or Звездочка мой?
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2 Answers
The gender of pronoun should match the gender of the endearment word.
Another example, there's a word of endearment зайчонок (bunny). When applied to a woman, as it often is, the combination looks like мой зайчонок where мой is a masculine form agreeing with masculine зайчонок.
However there're cases where а pronoun can also provisionally match the person's sex, that is when nouns have a feminine ending but are essentially gender-neutral, e.g. умница/чка, лапочка/лапуля, молодчина/нка and again зайка.
answered Mar 27, 2019 at 8:01
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I would say there would be common exceptions applied, like with profession denoting words, like "моя доктор" or "моя профессор". I think it can be appropriate here. Granted, such a term is not often used for endearment, but that is not impossible either.– AriochMar 29, 2019 at 13:55
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Yet a Google search shows many instances of "моя котенок" (although the great majority are "мой котенок"). Does that mean there is some flexibility in this rule? Mar 30, 2019 at 17:12
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1@Sagebrush Gardener i personally wouldn't say моя котёнок, i've checked the Google results, there're very few instances of this combination where моя relates to котёнок, the rest are enumerations where commas are missed, or sentences with missed dashes (like моя - котёнок) so it creates false positives, i don't think there's flexibility, there're just people who would wring the language to express what they feel, the only instance where i could understand feminine next to котёнок is when котёнок (катёнок as it's pronounced) is derived from the name Катя Mar 30, 2019 at 18:25
The answer to your question is NO. The describing word must correspond grammatically to the word you describe. These are grammatical relations and male/female problem is not really important here.
