Simply Slovenian

I just had an interesting discussion about a nice complex feature of
Slovenian language. As many other languages, we have three distinct
grammatical genders - masculine, feminine and neutral. Surely this is
nothing unique, as there is nothing unique in the fact that
grammatical gender has nothing whatsoever to do with the real gender
of the noun. But again I think Slovenian should earn a special prize
for the ease with which a certain noun may be transformed from one
gender to the other.

Let's have a look at an example: our basic word for a girl is
'deklica', disappointingly enough this noun is female. If we take a
slightly more poetic version 'dekle' it becomes neutral, while in a
condescending tone you might have use a 'deklic' which is masculine.
Of course all of these could simply be substituted by the plain old
'punca', which again is boringly feminine.

Not all the nouns in Slovenian act like that. In fact the girls are,
as usually, more of an exception. Which possibly shows how universal
these beautiful creatures are.

And, yes, I have been reading some heavy grammatical stuff lately
(namely Seth Lerer's History of the English Language).