From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Feb 9 15:47:13 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 A7C5337B6B2 for ; Fri, 9 Feb 2001 15:46:53 -0800 (PST) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 4135B6A916; Sat, 10 Feb 2001 10:16:52 +1030 (CST) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 10:16:52 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: "G. Adam Stanislav" Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Gender in Indo-European languages Message-ID: <20010210101652.Q16260@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20010209114704.A62359@lpt.ens.fr> <3.0.6.32.20010209085026.009e28e0@mail85.pair.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20010209085026.009e28e0@mail85.pair.com>; from adam@whizkidtech.net on Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 08:50:26AM -0600 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 Friday, 9 February 2001 at 8:50:26 -0600, G. Adam Stanislav wrote: >>> 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. > > Argh! That's what we get for using English as the universal language. > If we used Slovak, none of these problems would exist. (And yes, > Slovak is an Indo-European language.) > > Slovak has a different word for man as a human being and a different > one for man as a male human. So do many Indo-European languages. In German, "human being" is "Mensch", and "man" is "Mann". > Slovak does not need to say he, she, etc. Instead, it just uses the > verb in the third person, and implies the appropriate pronoun. This is typical of the slavonic languages, of course. > Furthermore, beside mine, yours, his, hers, etc, it has a personless > variety of all the above (similar to Latin suus). It could be very > roughly translated into English as "self's". So, we say things like > "turn on self's computer!" and "turn on self's computer", and "turns > on self's computer." Whereas in English these would be unclear and > would have to be "turn on your computer", "I turn on my computer" > and "he/she turns on his/her computer". This sounds like a reflexive pronoun, though I can't think of a similar usage in other languages for this particular case. I could imagine a dialectical use something like "start yourself your computer". > It is amazing to me to see entire political movements being formed > in the US based simply on the imperfection and rigidity of the > English tongue. > > The most ridiculous thing I have ever seen was an author claiming > that King Solomon was a sexist, basing that claim on the English > translation of the Bible. Hehehe! She even claimed that English was > the original language of mankind, then forgotten, and now being > rediscovered. And this crap came out of a major US publishing house. I think this says more about the people than the language. I'd guess that, in fact, English is one of the most flexible languages I know. 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