> From Proto-Germanic hudjǭ (“hut, shelter”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)kewdʰ- (“to cover, wrap, encase”), from *(s)kew- (“to cover”).

So the article is indeed incorrect in attributing it to Latin - it came straight from Proto-Indo-European.

PS: if Haut "cutis, skin" and Haus "house, family, sex" ("race"?) share a root, is that a remnant of racism? Scandalous!

No, because even if they did share a connection related to "skin", there are far simpler speculative explanations, like animal skin being used as a covering for a tent like house structure, like on a yurt.

A Scheuerlappen, "rag cloth" like a burlap, might be out of leather, though usually of rather coarser material. Just saying so because yurt (from mongolic) reminds of shirt, skirt and Schürze, in rhyme. However the r implies another root, "to cut", same as for Geschir "cutlery, dishes; harness [of horses]; vessel" (though zurren, zerren "to strap, stretch" might be akin, also see zieren, too).

I don't think your notion is implausible, but we have the words tent and Zelt already, and howmany more. housing in that sense, as something movable, could be paradox for a immobilia, but who knows.

While "to hide, conceal" might explain the connection reasonably (note that hide~leather is related closer to Haut than hiding), that would have to be the connection to rule out all others, but it's not that simple. Many \ske- roots relate to "to cut", and in my mind many figurative idioms can be derived from that sense to explain this or that. On the other hand, s-mobile may be treated as a prefix, and, assuming the prefix was sek- originally (i.e. "off"?), then we are left with a load of short stems -et, -es, .... Which reminds of some Akkadian words, and the question about who invented the se-dentry life style.

I think it is interesting how words got their gender established as part of their etymology. It baffled me when learing german that every other word had it different and it's important for grammar.

Nope, just a historical linguistics enthusiast, like a few others around here.

> I have no idea what other language would have "language" as feminine =).

Quite a few languages' words for language is grammatically "feminine", OTTOMH:

Arabic: "lugha(t)"

Sanskrit: "bhaashaa"

But grammatical gender of words without obvious gender associations shouldn't be interpreted in the biological sense of gender.

For example, there are languages whose "gender" system is actually more transparent, representing dichotomies like "animate" vs "inanimate", or "rational" (an entity capable of reason) vs "irrational".

Calling this phenomenon "gender" reflects a historical bias from the study of traditional Indo European and Semitic languages, which repurpose biological gender for grammatical gender, but it should really be called "noun classification" or something similar.

tongue (can mean language as well): a língua portuguesa, la lengua española.

language is different, Portuguese is feminine, and Spanish is masculine: a linguaguem de programação, el lenguaje de programación.

idiom is masculine in both: o idioma português, el idioma español.

While learning the language I've noted that in Portuguese words ending in ~gem are generally feminine regardless of their gender in French:

un garage -> uma garagem

un langage -> uma linguagem

un abordage -> uma abordagem

un bagage -> uma bagagem

And many, many others. My point is that I'm guessing that the diference in gender here is purely morphological and not tied to the meaning of the word and whether it's semantically tied to masculine or feminine traits (I'm sure you already knew all of that but I also know that English speakers often have misconceptions regarding how genders work in Romance languages, so I thought I'd clear it up).

When the transition from 3 gender to 2 happened, neuter words had to be "assigned" to one gender or another. Sometimes this was just arbitrary, other times conditioned by phonology or semantics.

The same phenomenon occurred when Sanskrit's 3 gender system gave way to the dual gender system of the new-Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi. In that case, most neuter words became masculine because they were often already phonologically similar to masculine words in the accusative case.

I have misconceptions about other Romance languages as well. I often confuse genders when trying to speak French, last week I learned moustache is feminine, while in Portuguese and Spanish it's masculine.

In spanish and english there are a version masculine (El lenguaje / The language) and other feminine (La lengua / The tongue) with subtle differences in meaning but equivalent basically. The feminine term is polysemic.

It seems that French use only the second version, in a polysemic sense also.

We only use "langue" for natural (for lack of a better word) languages. Programming languages are always "langages de programmation". I believe that the usage is strictly the same in English (you wouldn't lay "a programming tongue" either).