Hello Adam, John,

You both have helped us before on the Maltese-Hebrew language pair for the Apertium machine translation project [1].

After spending some time on Hebrew generation, I've turned my attention to morphological analysis of Maltese.
As an initial milestone, I focused on fully analyzing a specific Maltese paragraph [2]. You can see the results of the current Maltese analyser in the demo page:
http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/~fran/maltese/index.php

As I'm focusing now on nouns, I stumbled upon a question that I thought you could help with: Are Maltese proper nouns considered to have a gender?

As an example, the sample paragraph I worked on mentions several toponyms.
Do these have gender, and if so, can we assume that ones ending in -a are typically feminine, and ones ending in a consonant or -u are masculine?
Should the gender agreement for the adjective be different in "beautiful Barcelona" and "Beautiful Paris"?

[1] Project page: http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Maltese_and_Hebrew
[2] Full paragraph text: http://pastebin.com/9W1yfHvd


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