From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Feb 8 15:31:24 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 3437537B401 for ; Thu, 8 Feb 2001 15:31:03 -0800 (PST) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 5362A6A90D; Fri, 9 Feb 2001 10:00:58 +1030 (CST) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 10:00:58 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: Rahul Siddharthan Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav , "G. Adam Stanislav" , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Gender in Indo-European languages (was: Laugh: [Fwd: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-008]) Message-ID: <20010209100058.F11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <20010208150641.A15166@lpt.ens.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010208150641.A15166@lpt.ens.fr>; from rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in on Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 03:06:41PM +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 15:06:41 +0100, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Dag-Erling Smorgrav said on Feb 8, 2001 at 14:57:57: >> BTW, Norwegian has a very useful word which means "the concerned >> person", which makes it relatively easy to construct gender-neutral >> phrases. 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... > > And I learned of this amusing situation in French: the plural pronoun, > unlike in English, is gender-biased; it's "elles" only when the gender > of all parties is feminine, otherwise (for all-masculine or mixed) > it's "ils". So normally when you see "elles" you think the reference > is to women. But the word "personne" for person is feminine, so > legal documents often start off with "personnes" and continue with > "elles" even though there's no assumption that they're referring to > women; if you read such a thing from the middle, you may get > confused... This is a good example of what I said in my last message. In German legal contracts, the word for a company is "Gesellschaft", which is also feminine singular. The same considerations apply. 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