From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Feb 8 15:29:37 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5CB4237B401 for ; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 15:28:50 -0800 (PST) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 63DE56A90D; Fri, 9 Feb 2001 09:58:38 +1030 (CST) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 09:58:38 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Cc: Rahul Siddharthan , "G. Adam Stanislav" , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Gender in Indo-European languages (was: Laugh: [Fwd: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-008]) Message-ID: <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from des@ofug.org on Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 02:57:57PM +0100 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Thursday, 8 February 2001 at 14:57:57 +0100, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > Rahul Siddharthan writes: >> The idea is that if "his" is supposed to be gender-neutral in >> generic situations, "her" should also be regarded as >> gender-neutral. In a newly-designed language, this would be reasonable. In existing languages there are syntactical conventions. In English and most other languages I can think of, a group of people of mixed gender is masculine. > This discussion reminds me of the LaTeX macros that you use instead > of third person singular pronouns and possessive adjectives, which > alternate between the male and female form. > > BTW, Norwegian has a very useful word which means "the concerned > person", which makes it relatively easy to construct gender-neutral > phrases. Isn't "person" feminine? It is in other West European languages. > The only way to do that in English is to "play the pronoun game", > i.e. use (gender-neutral) plural forms instead of singular forms, > which makes for some pretty corny sentences... I'd say using "she" instead of "he" in the (no longer) quoted sentence looks corny. It contravenes rules of grammar in an attempt to look non-sexist. I think it creates exactly the opposite impression. Indo-European languages have two or three gender forms, though in many, including English, they are degenerate. In others, the gender needs have only superficial relationship to the object in question. For example, in German the words "Mädchen" ("girl") and "Weib" (woman) are neuter. In old English, "wif" ("wife") was neuter (really the same word as "Weib"; genders die hard) and "wif-mann" ("woman") was masculine. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message