Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 10:21:17 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Jamie Bowden <ragnar@sysabend.org> Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Gender in Indo-European languages (was: Laugh: [Fwd: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-008]) Message-ID: <20010209102117.G11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10102080925310.29538-100000@moo.sysabend.org>; from ragnar@sysabend.org on Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 09:26:51AM -0800 References: <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <Pine.BSF.4.10.10102080925310.29538-100000@moo.sysabend.org>
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On Thursday, 8 February 2001 at 9:26:51 -0800, Jamie Bowden wrote: > On 8 Feb 2001, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > >> Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> writes: >>> The idea is that if "his" is supposed to be gender-neutral in >>> generic situations, "her" should also be regarded as gender-neutral. >> >> 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. 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... > > One can easily be gender neutral if one so chooses. One would sound somewhat stilted referring to ones possessions. > The out of use thee, thine, and thou are all gender neutral pronouns > as well. "Thine" is a particular case of the possessive adjective "thy" (specifically, accusative). In older days "thy" definitely had gender, though it's now degenerate. "Thou" and "thee" are the same word in nominative and accusative respectively. They're personal pronouns (second person singular), and I find it difficult to see how they would address the problem at hand any better than "you" and "your". 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
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