Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2002 17:36:02 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Gender (was: The BSD daemon) Message-ID: <20020106173602.F45844@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020106063533.GB1003@raggedclown.net> References: <200201041523.g04FNr478167@lurza.secnetix.de> <200201051947.g05JlX602925@fac13.ds.psu.edu> <20020106063533.GB1003@raggedclown.net>
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On Sunday, 6 January 2002 at 7:35:33 +0100, Cliff Sarginson wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 05, 2002 at 02:47:32PM -0500, dochawk@psu.edu wrote:
>> Oliver orated,
>>
>>
>>> And by the way, it isn't "his". According to Kirk, it
>>> is neither male nor female. I don't know why people keep
>>> thinking it's a male. There's nothing that supports that
>>> assumption. ;-)
>>
> Mmm, try speaking Dutch.
> A company is referred to as "she"
> A train as "he"..
> etc..
> The problem is that there are (used to be) in languages
> male, female and neutral nouns. The mistake is to think
> these designations have anything to do with gender, they
> often do not. They are technical grammatical terms.
Indeed. Most Indo-European languages still have strongly defined
gender, and the grammatical rules are old and hard to change. English
and Farsi lost gender for much the same reasons some time ago, but
before that you could expect that things in Dutch and English would
almost always have the same gender.
> Dutch used to have male/female/neuter nouns. The male/female ones
> got rolled into one. So there are two words in Dutch for "the"
> .. "de" and "het". "De" usually being for what used to be
> feminine/masculine nouns, "het" for the others.
You're contradicting yourself here. You were right the first time.
Just because the definite article may have the same form doesn't mean
that they're the same gender.
> There are some arcane rules for working out whether a "de" or "het"
> should be used, one of the most interesting is that Dutch makes a
> great use of diminutives, by adding "tje" or "je" to the end of a
> noun it makes the object "smaller", or cuter :). Sometimes however
> it makes it a completely different word altogether, e.g. "telefoon"
> = "telephone" but a "telefoontje" which should mean "a small
> telephone" means in fact "a telephone call". Now all diminutives
> are "het" words, even if what they make diminutive is a "de" word.
Yes, but this a very old grammatical rule, and it applies equally well
to English or German. Diminutives are neuter.
> So the masculine feminine neuter thing is all nonsense when you see
> the word "het meisje", since the -je, makes it a diminutive it has
> to take the neutral "the" which is "het". A "meisje" is a young
> girl.
For the same reason that a maiden is also neuter, because it's a
diminutive. "Ðæt mægden" (neuter) in Old English.
In general, it's interesting how few words describing women are
feminine. "Woman" is masculine ("Se wif-mann" or "se wifmon" in old
English). The word for "wife" is neuter ("ðæt wif"), as it is in
Dutch.
Oh, yes, Greek has similar rules. "Dæmon" has a gender based on its
form as well. It's neuter.
Greg
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